I was looking for some hints on an issue I’m having with the company wireless access point. Googling, as it often does, turned up something else useful: a wireless-savvy geek has figured out how to host multiple wireless networks on his WRT54G.
Why is this useful? Say you’re a giving guy, you know you have more bandwidth than you typically use, and want to make that extra bandwidth available to the public while not exposing your internal network. OpenWRT and a Linksys WRT54G can do this.
You can have your own, internal SSID that only you know and use – and you can have a publicly-visible SSID that’s limited by OpenWRT’s firewall and traffic-shaping rules to only allow the public access to certain things. Bingo, you’ve got two access points in one, with two separate rules governing their use.
Imagine, for instance, that businesses all along Fayetteville Street opted to set up a common SSID between them. Let’s call it AcorNet, for example. A user could configure access to this network on her computer and use her laptop (or iPhone, etc.) anywhere that SSID was available. All the while the businesses hosting this bandwidth would be safely insulated from rogue traffic. Pretty cool, huh?
It would be a virtual city-wide network but with no need for a central backbone, instead using the individual businesses’ Internet gateways. Easy, safe, and useful.
and don’t forget the all-important: cheap