request: license webservice

RouterOS General
1

this post is aimed at MikroTik, but I’m posting it here to check the interest in the community.

At our factory we have an application that automaticly upgrades bios, routeros, installs config, etc.. and gets the unit a license from mikrotik.

untill recently the app used the “/system license …”-method, but as you know that is not longer possible because of:

http://forum.mikrotik.com//viewtopic.php?t=10226
http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/All_about_licenses

so now we have to fetch it from our account-webpages on mikrotik.com. It works, but it’s not the cleanest solution. The method will break everytime mikrotik changes the webpages.

So I’m requesting a license webservice (or something like it) that gives applications a clean interface to request licenses from.

Is this something that might be possible to create?

2

Sounds like an excelent place for an XML application.

3

why can’t you use Netinstall? tell us what features are missing in Netinstall, and we will improve it so that it can do what you need

4

Sure, there are several features missing in Netinstall that we need:

  • First of all, our units are being produced/installed/upgraded/configured/tested/packaged by factory workers, not network admins. This means that the software has to be very simple to use, with few steps. Our current app has these steps: select unit-type, plug in serial-cable, press start-button, plug in PoE-cable.

  • Integrated label-printing with serialnumber for the current unit-type, mac-address, etc.

  • Database integration, for logging, for registration of new units, for integration with other systems in the company

  • Flexible app that makes it simple for the workers to create new units of different types. Example: the process to make units based on WRAP and RB500 is different, but the app masks this difference to the user. And even such small differences between master and slave-units of the same hardware-type is masked for the user. The user-process is identical each time. The user does not even have to know the concept of a license or why it is critical to update the bios.

  • WLAN-interface-testing. The application has to iterate the different IFs on the different units and check the signalstrength against a testunit, and match the results against our given reference values for the current unit-type.

  • BIOS-update on WRAP-boards. I haven’t actually tested this with netinstall, so this feature might be in netinstall.

  • License-installation without any userinteraction


    But as you see, our problem is that we need a simple app that does all this for all our different unit-types with as little human interaction done as possible.

This minimizes the risk for mistakes, and secures that each unit is up to spec and has no errors.

You could implement this unit-difference thing in your app by making it support “Profiles”. That way the user of netinstall can define his own profiles of his own unit-types. And the process for each profile could be customized to the unit-type’s needs.



So there you have it, this is why we cannot use netinstall at the factory.

But now I need to get some fresh coffee and get back to work :slight_smile: