Beginners • Pi 5 SSH over building WiFi

Hey everyone,

I'm a beginner and just got my Raspberry Pi 5 set up for the first time. I'm living in an apartment building and the only WiFi available is a shared building network (WPA2). I've been trying to SSH into my Pi remotely from my laptop and ran into a bunch of issues and would appreciate any help!

My setup:
- Raspberry Pi 5
- Raspberry Pi OS (full/desktop)
- Windows laptop
- Shared building WiFi
- Pi powered separately

Tried the following things:
- Flashed the SD card with Raspberry Pi Imager with SSH enabled and WiFi credentials set
- Tried SSH-ing in through Command Prompt but Pi wasn't showing up on the network at first
- Asked Claude for help, apparently 5GHz doesn't work sometimes and it recommended using my hotspot (2.4GHz)
- Switched to my phone hotspot as a workaround - it still could not connect when I tried pinging or SSH-ing using the hostname, but THEN I checked the IP address manually on my phone and then Pi connected fine and I was able to SSH in successfully using the IP from my phone's hotspot page
- Added the building WiFi credentials via nmcli once I was SSH'd in over hotspot - Pi connected successfully according to the message
- However, once the Pi is on the building WiFi, I can't SSH into it from my laptop (also on the same building WiFi)

According to Claude, "client isolation" is enabled on the network.

My questions:
1. Is there a reason the simple SSH command, ssh my_username@hostname doesn't work since it only works when I use the IP address?
2. I don't want to use my hotspot for this continuously, so is there a way to fix the problem with the building WiFi instead?
3. Say I am not able to fix it - for my use case (running a project that calls external APIs), is it okay to leave the Pi on the building WiFi for internet access and only connect it to my hotspot when I need to SSH in for development?

Thanks in advance!

Statistics: Posted by tejaswi_manoj — Wed May 13, 2026 10:08 pm

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