Why oh wifi?

If you have your home wifi properly secured, what do you do if Uncle Brian turns up for a flying visit, just happens to have his laptop with him and asks to use the Internet?

I had the choice of getting his laptop authorised to use the wifi with all the security still on, turn all the security off briefly or lend him one of my laptops. He really wanted to use his so it was one of the first two.

What a choice! Why don't router manufacturers build in some easy system to add a guest temporarily?

I didn't really want to pass out my WPA pre-shared key to Uncle Brian. It's not that I don't trust him, but I just don't feel comfortable with adding it to PCs which are not under my control. I could have changed the key later but that would have meant updating 5 separate machines, a pain in itself.

In the end I switched off security and disabled MAC address filtering, chose a new SSID and turned SSID-broadcasting on, so for a while my wifi was wide open. I didn't worry too much; I can't imagine a team of spies armed with packet sniffers had been encamped in the garden for months waiting for me to drop my guard so they could steal the family photos off the hard drive.

Speaking of hard drives, I suddenly had a panic. In principle Uncle Brian could now access the shared drives on my network; so I turned sharing off temporarily.

Brian was able to access his email and whatever else on the Internet. Meantime the security changes broke my son's wifi connection - he was less than gruntled.

The worst part was having to reverse all the changes after Uncle Brian and his partner bid their farewell, particularly reactivating sharing on the hard disks of some of the PCs. I made mistakes with the share names so some programs which I use over the network were broken and I had to check the pathnames and rename the shares. It took a while to get everything working and settled back down as it had been before. A disproportionate amount of hassle to let a random visitor check emails for a while.

I really do think router manufacturers should build in temporary guest features, or there should be a provision for this in the wifi standard.

I had a look on the Internet to see whether anyone provides such a facility. I did come across McAfee's Wireless Protection system which makes it easy to add new PCs to the wifi while maintaining security, and it keeps changing the key so I could just have disabled Uncle Brian's access rights and the old key would be no good to him. It might be an option for the future. The main drawback for me is that I use my PDA with the wifi and the McAfee client software would not install on that.

I gather some routers support multiple virtual networks (different SSIDs with different security and different access rights) using a single router.

Or I might just plug in an old access point ...

Any better ideas out there?