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Ask HN: Apartment provides Free Wifi, wan't to create my own network
2 points by thezach on June 15, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments
So I'm moving into an apartment complex with free Wifi (and it appears to be good, high bandwidth, etc) however I want to run my own wifi network for security reasons such as the following.<p>1) I don't want my neighbors casting to my chromecast all the time 2) I don't want my printer visible 3) I just don't want my surfing habits made public to my neighbors.<p>Is there a way I can use a wireless access point to connect to the public network create my own secure wifi network and then tunnel all that traffic to a VPN?<p>Yes I could get my own internet service, but if its free I would prefer not to. Thanks!<p><p>Thanks for any tips and pointers on this.



Note - you do paragraph breaks on HN by leaving a blank line, not by adding a <p> tag.

The answer is yes, but you'll have to set things up yourself. One way involves two AP's, and a computer with two ethernet cards. You'll need AP's that can log into other wireless networks (note, not all consumer gear can do this) so be selective.

Then you'd wire things like this:

AP to apt <--> computer <-> your local AP.

The local AP should run a different "channel" to reduce interference overlap, and you'll need to setup the computer as a router and let it handle the VPN and routing for you.

You might also look into one of the alternate AP firmwares (Tomato/etc.). They might be able to be setup to work just with a pair of compatible AP's without the computer in between.


thanks the paragraph tags showed up in my post when I had a title longer than 80 chars and had to edit the title.





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