i created a node in a raspberry pi 4, behind another mikrotik in my mother's home network, and can access everything, ping every node, egress, etc... so the issue is either with the VM i was using as node, or some other restriction in the mikrotik of my lab... that network is also behind a fortinet so they could be messing with the packets or something... i'll recreate the VM just in case. another question: when you add an external client to a node, all traffic fom/to that ext client is thru that node? the only way to make a device to connect to the nearest node is making that device a node itself, right?