Virtual RouterOS offline licence activation (again!)

RouterOS Virtualization
1

Hi All,

We are upgrading a very old Dude 3.6 installation on Windows and obviously moving to some sort of virtual RouterOS.
Our Dude bandwidth utilisation is about 3Mbps. Our system has no internet access.
The doco suggests we use a CHR install.
The free (non-trial) level gives 1Mbps which does not work for us.
We would happily pay for P1, but cannot activate the licence because there is no internet.

There are a few forum posts re offline / air-gapped systems. One suggests a temporary internet connection (no way), another says to use x86 instead of CHR, another does some trickery in ProxMox, someone asked for a custom npk generated for offline use, some ppl want a faster free version, others want slower paid versions, someone says "ask mikrotik support, see if there's a workaround" (nothing mentioned in the doco I've seen yet, but yes it's worth asking).

Probably the most workable solution I have seen so far is to use a trial P1, and when an upgrade is needed after the trial has ended export the config, build a new trial VM with the new release, import the config and play on. That sounds almost ok but it's a bit clunky.

To be clear, we will run RouterOS only to run The Dude server, we wish to use a legitimate solution and are happy to pay for it.

It needs to provide enough throughput, we need to be able to touch or move our VM without breaking our licence (I believe that CHR is good for this, x86 maybe not so much), and we must be able to activate our licence without direct internet access.

Thoughts, suggestions, comments please?

2

If payment is not an issue, simply buy the RouterBOARD 1100Dx4 Dude Edition and all the problems will be over...

1 Like
3

If you’re running a CHR only for The Dude, you may want to verify whether you need a license at all. CHR licensing is for forwarding throughput and doesn’t (at least in my experience) throttle traffic originating from or terminating on the CHR itself. I’m running The Dude on CHRs with no license and haven’t had any trouble.

4

@rextended thanks for pointing out the physical option, I had not even thought of it tbh.
Our existing Dude install is on a VM so we prefer to stay virtual, all the infrastructure is there already etc.
@ghostinthenet that sounds promising. Do you know the bandwidth your Dude configuration is using?

5

@speak

Mine's peaking with spikes around 45Mb/s (I use if for other network management functions besides The Dude) but that's still way beyond the 1Mb/s throughput cap.

I just ran a /tool/bandwidth-test from it to the local router and got an average of 512Mb/s. (That's likely limited by the RB1100AHx4's CPU.)