In what probably consumed my entire year’s worth of luck I Winboxed into one of my main routers three days ago and was greeted with the message that the licence was due to expire in 38 minutes, and if not renewed the system would then shut down.
Had it done so my entire network would have lost Internet connection and I would have had a five-hour round trip to access the board manually plus whatever time it took to find out what was wrong and, presumably, netinstall a new ROS and licence it.
The puzzling (to me) thing is that the board concerned was an RB532 which has been doing its thing quietly and well with the licence it came with for at least three years.
Fortunately I managed to re-licence the thing and stop the count-down with twenty minutes to spare but it was a close and entirely unexpected call.
I was under the obvious misapprehension that when one purchased a RouterBoard one purchased a perpetual licence with it, but that seems not to be the case and I now have to go around my older boards on a regular basis just to ensure they’re not going to close down on me.
Yes I did. Generally I leave well alone and I still have a lot of RouterBoards running very happily with v2.9.51, but I had to upgrade this one as I had bought a fistful of R52nMs without any indication that you had to upgrade a board to v4 in order to run them!
I don’t recall receiving any warning at the time of the upgrade that I was exchanging a perpetual licence for a time-limited one - and the upgrade was a lot less than a year ago. Still, Mikrotik are $45 better off and poor little Latvia needs all the help it can get, I suppose.
Whenever you go to v4 upgrade to 3.30 first. Then go to the license section in Winbox from a computer that is connected to the Internet, and click Upgrade License. That will - for free - upgrade your license to the new format. Reboot, then upgrade to 4.x.
License issues
When upgrading from older versions, there could be issues with your license key. Possible scenarios:
When upgrading from RouterOS v2.8 or older, the system might complain about expired upgrade time. To override this, use Netinstall to upgrade. Netinstall will ignore old license restriction and will upgrade
When upgrading to RouterOS v4 or newer, the system will ask you to update license to a new format. To do this, ensure your Winbox PC (not the router) has a working internet connection without any restrictions to reach > www.mikrotik.com > and click “update license” in the license menu.