wifi behind wifi

[grimble]

Hello,

I'm the closest thing to a network expert in our school of five employees, and so it is up to me to get an answer to this question:

We are renting our site, at least for this year, and our only internet connection is the free open wireless given to the public through our landlords. It is a good, fast connection but very unsecure. There are no ethernet cables leading to the office, and so their wireless is our only option. My question is, can we set up another wireless router behind this existing wireless network? We are very small, and none of us are particularly computer savvy so any solution needs to be easy to use on a daily basis by our office staff and teachers.

We are most concerned about private and sensitive files on our secretary's hard drive. If a new network is too cumbersome or unnecessary do you have any recommendations as to encryption? Or any other ideas?

Thanks!

 

[Mushkins]

I personally wouldn't conduct business over public wifi. Even if you're renting the site, you should be able to get your own internet connection from a local ISP. I'd discuss it with your landlord.

Setting up your own private network with the public wifi as the WAN is doable if not a little tricky, but is still far from the level of security I would want for a business.

 

[drebo]

You need a bridge. A Ubiquiti Nanostation should be sufficient and is very inexpensive. That will give you a copper Ethernet handoff for you to do with as you'd like.

 

[JackMDS]

Get the bridge as mentioned above and then get a Wireless Router.

Feed the output of the Bridge to the WAN port of your Wireless Router and use the LAN side for your private secure LAN.

The principle is on this page. The difference is that the bridge is used to connect to the First (Landlord) Router.

http://www.ezlan.net/shield.html



😎

 

[VirtualLarry]

I'm afraid that there is nothing that you can do, to conduct business "privately" over the internet, with a public WAN. Unless you consider a VPN service. Adding your own Wifi router as a bridge (with NAT) will isolate the local machines, and provide a firewall, but the overall WAN conduit is still going to be public. If anyone is running a sniffer, they can see your traffic. (Unless encrypted, by using a VPN.)

 

[Red Squirrel]

I would go with the bridge route and put in a NAT router and do everything wired, using your own private range. This way it's it's own private LAN. Only traffic going off to/from the internet will go through the wireless.

Though idealy I would look at getting an ISP connection just so you are in control of your own internet.