Changing Software IDs?!?

RouterOS General
1

Heya all!

I do voluntary work for Townsville Wireless here in QLD, Australia.

We recently purchased 4 licenses for deployment on Mt Stuart and other areas here, and during an upgrade to 3.0rc7 I realised there was not enough space on the 64MB Compact flash (I usually do a full install, and disable stuff we’re not using incase our requirements change).

I just thought I’d do a net-install, and reinstall the latest version that way.

Much to my irritation, the software IDs have now changed, and even trying a net-install in the box they were first net-installed with, still returns different IDs.

Zero Wiping the disks also didn’t help, but doing so changes the IDs again.

I thought the IDs were generated from the serial # of the disk device. These are compact flash cards in compact flash to IDE Adapters.

This is cartainly a fun one, and I’m willing to send the cards to mikrotik if needed for testing as we now have 4 defunct licenses.

I also did some investigation, it seems the machine I an using (Intel D815EEA2 based system) is suddenly using different drive translations (C H S). Forcing LBA assist has no effect.

Anyone else got any ideas? Apart from banging my head against a brick wall? :laughing:

AIVAS - That TSV Wireless guy..

2

Some more interesting stuff I have found…

The first sector of the “harddrive” (Fujifilm Digital Memory card 64MB) Seems to have a fingerprint of some sort from bytes 0x100 to 0x10B. Zeroing these causes another software id to be generated. Be nice if it would generate the one I registered with.

Anyone else using CF cards in IDE adapters might want to back up the first sector using BSD or Linux just in case. Don’t want to loose that fingerprint like I did and loose your registration…

Think I’ll grab a full sector backup of the still working ones now to complement the mikrotik backup.

AIVAS - That TSV Wireless Guy..

3

Gets even better, used “dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/ad4 bs=16384” (Using PCMCIA to CF adapter on BSD) and now netinstall partitions, formats, then fails to mount, reboot, new Software ID. O_o

I think I’ve lost AU$260 in licenses now, as how can I prove the disk is the one the license was for if it’s ID keeps changing?

AIVAS

4

It’s actually very easy - on first problem, you contact support and get it fixed.