Sharing an iMac with a guest

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.

If your Router has the ability to facilitate a 2nd Wi-Fi address you can setup a guest network. That would have NOTHING to do with your Mac other than logging into that guest account once setup. If you happen to own a Mesh network, many have that ability you simply need to check your routers specifications and then learn how to setup a guest network.

Regarding the malware question, simply download malwarebytes and then after your guest leaves run it and it will remove any malware found on the system.

Your other option is to simply deny the guests access to your Mac. They can always use their phones or tablets to access what they need on the Internet.

Well unless this person is an Internet genius they won't know any of your accounts. I think you are being a bit over paranoid though. If you simply setup the guess Wi-Fi account, give it weird password your stuff will be fine. Once the guests are gone, simply change the password again or remove the new guest account.

However the really simple thing to do is not give them access to your iMac.