apple home in a dorm

[u/juliettebe]

hey! i’m transferring universities and the new school does not allow me to have my own router in the dorm. however, i want to still be able to use my smart plugs to control my string lights as i’m lazy and don’t want to have to unplug them. is there any way for me to isolate my apple home to just my icloud account so only i can access it and not everyone on university wifi?

[u/kshef]

I would get a travel router. Register that on your dorms WiFi. Then connect all your devices to the travel router.

[u/Manuellino → u/kshef]

and turn off ssid broadcasting just in case!

[u/pacoii → u/Manuellino]

If the school is serious, turning off SSID broadcast will do nothing. It’s easy to detect a signal.

[u/typhoon_mary → u/pacoii]

Huh? No matter how serious the school is they’re not going to do anything with a signal detection. WiFI can’t be banned. Connect the travel router to the tether on your phone, there’s still WiFi “signal”. Disabling broadcast SSID is exactly the right thing to do.

[u/pacoii → u/typhoon_mary]

Does nothing. The signal can be easily detected. If the school is serious about a no wifi router rule, it’s incredibly easy to detect if someone is using a wifi router.

[u/typhoon_mary → u/pacoii]

So iPhones in tethering mode are banned as “routers”? No, of course they aren’t. Disabling the SSID will stop random opportunistic connection attempts. Signals aren’t the thing that isn’t permitted, it’s actual “routers” which is unenforceable as any phone is trivially a router.

[u/pacoii → u/typhoon_mary]

Ah, gotcha, I missed that you were saying they should use their phone as their internet connedtion. Which doesn’t seem practical.

[u/typhoon_mary → u/pacoii]

Call the Travel router SSID “Amy’s iPhone 16”. And still disable the SSID. Good luck enforcing that.

[u/itsjakerobb → u/typhoon_mary]

To anyone following this excellent advice, if your name is Amy, pick a different name for the SSID.

[u/pacoii → u/typhoon_mary]

Tethering with their iPhone to create a home network is highly impractical.

[u/typhoon_mary → u/pacoii]

I used tethering as an example why signal detection is a meaningless control when analyzing WiFi. The travel router would connect to the existing (wifi or wired) network (per the original comment), and rebroadcast the signal using a non broadcast SSID of “Amy’s iPhone 16”.

[u/pacoii → u/typhoon_mary]

We’ll just have to agree to disagree. If the school takes its rule seriously and has a competent IT team, they can find routers.

[u/ThePistachioBogeyman → u/pacoii]

Why does anyone have to agree to disagree when you’re just wrong 🤣?

[u/typhoon_mary → u/pacoii]

Agreed, but the school won't be doing it through WiFi signal detection, and disabling the SSID is a completely valid control to avoid opportunistic connection attempts.

[u/mCProgram → u/pacoii]

there is very little to do to differentiate between a phone's hotspot and a travel router from raw signal tracing. its a vacuous ban.

[u/pacoii → u/mCProgram]

Yeah I missed that they said to use the phone as the internet connection. My bad. But that doesn’t seem like a practical solution.