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claimed4all

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 26, 2008
414
0
I currently have a private wired network and want to add public WiFi, on a budget, so I do not want to purchase any new equipment.

My internet comes in to our modem and goes to a generic wired router. Only 3 or 4 machines are then off of that with a couple of printers. Now I have a WRT54G that I would like to utilize for a little public wifi, no more than half a dozen people would ever be on at a time. What I want is so the Public Wifi will not have access to our private computers or printers. How best would I go about this? Thanks.
 

mikes63737

macrumors 65816
Jul 26, 2005
1,147
338
The ideal way to do this is to connect the modem to a switch, then connect the WAN port of each router to the switch. But this might not work for everyone because not all ISPs provide two addresses.

The other way, which is not necessarily ideal, is to connect the modem to the WAN port of the Public router, and the WAN port of the Private router to a LAN port on the Public router. This way, the firewall on the private router will stop them from accessing your network, but you can still access their network. This might break some applications because you're using double-NAT.

This is just my personal opinion, but I wouldn't even bother setting up Public WiFi because you're responsible for your users' actions, and someone could start leeching off of your connection.
 

DNSgeek

macrumors newbie
Feb 11, 2009
18
0
USA
Running a public WiFi may violate your TOS agreement with your ISP, as well. If you do connect your office router up to the wireless router's LAN connection, users on the WiFi will not be able to "sniff" your office network traffic, since the wireless and office traffic will be on different switch segments. Additionally, you want to make sure the DHCP servers on the two routers are leasing addresses from different address blocks. (ie 192.168.0.0/24 and 192.168.1.0/24) Double NAT shouldn't be a problem, I've done it successfully before.
 

claimed4all

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 26, 2008
414
0
Good deal, my biggest item was which router plugged into which. So my understanding is

Modem -> Public Wifi Router -> Private Network Router (firewalled and different IP scheme)
Thanks for the TOS agreements heads up, I will take a look into that.
 
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