Cornish_Jack wrote:
Simple question. We have guests in the house who are strangers to us. They use our guest WiFi and everything’s fine. Occasionally we’re asked if they can use our iMac. Then we set them up with a guest account but of course it uses the same WiFi access and defeats the point of the guest wi-fi. 1) is there a way to configure a guest account on a shared device so it uses a different WiFi? 2) follow up question, if they’re working on the same machine and download malware, does it protect the machine/ network if they’re hooked up to the guest WiFi? Thank you in advance for any wisdom/ guidance/ pointers.
As far as protecting the machine from malware, having the Mac hooked up to the Internet using the guest Wi-Fi network wouldn't provide any special protection against that. The point of setting up a guest network is to avoid having to disclose your regular Wi-Fi password, and/or to limit access from a guest's device to other devices on your LAN. E.g., in a corporate setting, employees who access Wi-Fi through the regular SSID and who complete authentication successfully might have network connectivity to all internal machines, while guests would only be given network connectivity to the public Internet.
If malware is coming in from the public Internet, it doesn't matter whether it does so on the main Wi-Fi network or on the guest Wi-Fi network, as far as the machine downloading the malware is concerned.