Summary. In a “road warrior” setup, how to make a Mikrotik Router connect to whatever Wi-Fi is available in range and was pre-set upfront?
Description.
I have a friend who wants to work while traveling abroad. He has a company Windows laptop with limited permissions (no admin rights). He can only connect to the company systems while being in the home country (geo-fencing). He cannot create any VPN tunnels on this laptop or install additional VPN clients. He can, however, add Wi-Fi networks.
He has a Starlink subscription, and there are a few known Wi-Fis at various places he often visits (second home abroad, friend’s home, parents’ home etc.).
The solution I worked out is to get a Mikrotik Router in their home (in which he’s expected to be connecting from), and set up a WireGuard, OpenVPN or SSTP VPN on it. He already has this router (a hAP ax3), a static IP DSTNATed and all ports open, so this is a non-issue.
Now I would like to use another Mikrotik Wi-Fi Router in a “road warrior” set up. I’d like to make it a client for some known Wi-Fi networks (the Starlink’s one, and those few others) by entering their SSIDs/passwords upfront so that Mikrotik connect to whatever is in the range. I’d like to set up an AP on it with a different but always constant SSID (such as my_travel_wifi - just an example). This router would tunnel all traffic (0.0.0.0/0) to the home router via VPN.
The work laptop would connect to this router, and seamlessly be able to connect securely to the company systems.
The issue.
All except Wi-Fi is clear for me. Regarding Mikrotik acting as a Wi-Fi client, in version 6 there was the “Connect list” which I think was meant for this scenario (unfortunately I never used that). In v7 it seems there’s no such thing. My issue is - is it possible to configure RouterOS for this scenario? I mean to make Mikrotik work just like a typical smartphone/laptop - automatically connect to whatever Wi-Fi is in range and was already set up. Is RouterOS able to “memorize” around 10 SSIDs with passwords? What about channel settings? How to configure that?
The friend has a secondary laptop that I planned to use instead of this Mikrotik, and share its VPN connection, but unfortunately it’s a Mac, and it very hard to share a WireGuard or OpenVPN connection via Wi-Fi in macOS while being connected to another Wi-Fi as a client. So this is not an option for me, unless there’s a software for it, but my attempt to find it did not work. I’d prefer to use Mikrotik, as I know it pretty well (apparently except wireless functionalities…).
Below are diagrams that help visualize the elaborate description.
Thank you in advance.
