The situation: You have a computer with no wifi, and you have an access point. No wifi, so no Internet. Sad face. But if you have a MikroTik router with a wifi interface and a couple of Ethernet interfaces, you can set up a private Ethernet network and connect your computer to wifi through the MikroTik.

The MicroTik wireless interfaces can be put into several different modes. The one we want here is “station” mode.

You will need the SSID and PSK for the wifi access point. For this article we’ll assume an SSID or “MYSSID” and a PSK of “mySecret”; substitute your own values as appropriate.

This article also assumes a MikroTik with a default configuration – a WAN port on ether1, the rest of the Ethernet ports and wlan1 bridged together, a DHCP server on the bridge.

Step 1: Take the wireless interface out of bridge-local

/interface bridge port
remove [find interface=wlan1]

Step 2: Set up a new security profile

/interface wireless security-profile
add name=station mode=dynamic-keys authentication-types=wpa-psk,wpa2-psk wpa-pre-shared-key="mySecret" wpa2-pre-shared-key="mySecret"

Step 3: Configure station mode

/interface wireless
set 0 mode=station ssid=MYSSID security-profile=station

After this step, the interface should change to “Running” status, but you won’t have any connectivity yet.

Step 4: Set up a DHCP client on the wireless interface

/ip dhcp-client add interface=wlan1 disabled=no

You should see an IP address appear on wlan1

Step 5: Set up NAT on the wireless interface

/ip firewall nat
add chain=srcnat action=masquerade out-interface=wlan1

There you go. Plug your Ethernet cable into one of the Ethernet ports on the router (not ether1 though 🙂 and you should have connectivity to the world.