Hello,

My fresh install of Mikrotik routerboard OS on a x64 machine (using an ISO for 6.37.1) is shutting down after displaying "Demo license expired. Please re-install the router."

The machine is a dedicated server in a datacenter. I do not have physicall access to it. I installed Routerboard OS on it today for the first time. I was able to use it via console access initially. I tried to set up IP addresses and screwed up so I decided to re-install Routerboard OS. During the re-install, the installer software asked me if I wanted to keepy my old settings and I selected "no". Not sure if that is related.

Now whenever I boot up the dedicated server, I see the message right after the Mikrotik login prompt: "Demo license expired. Please re-install the router."

What can I do now to fix this? I can't change anything on the server (IP addresses or MAC addresses.)

Again I do not have physical access to the server. I have tried re-installing it several times and same error message. Please see the following video as evidence of this issue:

https://youtu.be/BLjeiNg1goE

My fresh install of Mikrotik routerboard OS on a x64 machine (using an ISO for 6.37.1) is shutting down after displaying "Demo license expired. Please re-install the router."

Hi Rizwan,

It is a bug that has been reported previously, please see http://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?t=107629

If it is a virtual machine, perhaps you can use the CHR instead?

PS thanks for the VPN service.

Hi. So this hasn't been fixed at all?

It is not a virtual machine. It is a dedicated server. I tried CHR on Amazon EC2 and it works great but Amazon bandwidth costs are too much for me. I do not know where else I can use CHR. The dedicated server I'm leasing has a ton of bandwidth and I would like to use Routerboard OS there.

You're welcome on the VPN. Still using it?

My fresh install of Mikrotik routerboard OS on a x64 machine (using an ISO for 6.37.1) is shutting down after displaying "Demo license expired. Please re-install the router."

Hi Rizwan,

It is a bug that has been reported previously, please see http://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?t=107629

If it is a virtual machine, perhaps you can use the CHR instead?

PS thanks for the VPN service.

Hi. So this hasn't been fixed at all?

It is not a virtual machine. It is a dedicated server. I tried CHR on Amazon EC2 and it works great but Amazon bandwidth costs are too much for me. I do not know where else I can use CHR. The dedicated server I'm leasing has a ton of bandwidth and I would like to use Routerboard OS there.

You're welcome on the VPN. Still using it?

I would assume it hasn't been fixed if you are having problems with it. You can go back to an older version of RouterOS that did not have this problem (v6.34.4 and older). Or maybe reformatting before reinstalling might fix the error, if you really want to use a more current version.

I was using it, but the policy routing to make just Netflix go over the VPN was problematic, the MikroTik script I had to generate the address list from DNS cache used too much CPU on my router. Wound up getting a smart DNS proxy instead.

Did not get it fixed. I thought I did so I spent 2 hours configuring the install and needed to reboot. Rebooted it and again got the Demo license expired. Boohoo.

I found that v6.37.1 is pretty stable for incoming VPNs. Older versions .. not so good. That is why I chose the latest version.

Hi. So this hasn't been fixed at all?

It is not a virtual machine. It is a dedicated server. I tried CHR on Amazon EC2 and it works great but Amazon bandwidth costs are too much for me. I do not know where else I can use CHR. The dedicated server I'm leasing has a ton of bandwidth and I would like to use Routerboard OS there.

You're welcome on the VPN. Still using it?

I would assume it hasn't been fixed if you are having problems with it. You can go back to an older version of RouterOS that did not have this problem (v6.34.4 and older). Or maybe reformatting before reinstalling might fix the error, if you really want to use a more current version.

I was using it, but the policy routing to make just Netflix go over the VPN was problematic, the MikroTik script I had to generate the address list from DNS cache used too much CPU on my router. Wound up getting a smart DNS proxy instead.

Did not get it fixed. I thought I did so I spent 2 hours configuring the install and needed to reboot. Rebooted it and again got the Demo license expired. Boohoo.

I found that v6.37.1 is pretty stable for incoming VPNs. Older versions .. not so good. That is why I chose the latest version.

Did you try a reformat before reinstalling 6.37.1? Maybe there is something left behind.

If you have tested CHR and is happy with it why don't you install a hypervisor on the hardware? You can control drivers much better and you can use both VMware, Hyper-V and KVM for free. You will still get good performance and in case you want to seperate loads you can run several CHR on the same hardware. This is good in cases where ROS don't have multicore very well.

I am actually testing VirtualBox and CHR right now. Will post my results. But I would liked to have used the x86 ISO. Is this a known issue that is being fixed? The power of a 16 core HP or Dell server running RouterOS would be fantastic.

If you have tested CHR and is happy with it why don't you install a hypervisor on the hardware? You can control drivers much better and you can use both VMware, Hyper-V and KVM for free. You will still get good performance and in case you want to seperate loads you can run several CHR on the same hardware. This is good in cases where ROS don't have multicore very well.

I got it to work using a Windows 7 host. Installed VirtualBox. Then installed the CHR .VDI file from the Mikrotik downloads section. Bridged two network adapters inside the .VDI to the two physical ethernet adapters that I have on the co-located server. With a little tweaking I was able to get CHR working.

I just don't like the idea that CHR is relying on a host OS to be working. What if Windows crashes under load? That's why I was hoping the ISO would work. But as it stands -- it doesn't.

I am actually testing VirtualBox and CHR right now. Will post my results. But I would liked to have used the x86 ISO. Is this a known issue that is being fixed? The power of a 16 core HP or Dell server running RouterOS would be fantastic.

If you have tested CHR and is happy with it why don't you install a hypervisor on the hardware? You can control drivers much better and you can use both VMware, Hyper-V and KVM for free. You will still get good performance and in case you want to seperate loads you can run several CHR on the same hardware. This is good in cases where ROS don't have multicore very well.

I got it to work using a Windows 7 host. Installed VirtualBox. Then installed the CHR .VDI file from the Mikrotik downloads section. Bridged two network adapters inside the .VDI to the two physical ethernet adapters that I have on the co-located server. With a little tweaking I was able to get CHR working.

I just don't like the idea that CHR is relying on a host OS to be working. What if Windows crashes under load? That's why I was hoping the ISO would work. But as it stands -- it doesn't.

I am actually testing VirtualBox and CHR right now. Will post my results. But I would liked to have used the x86 ISO. Is this a known issue that is being fixed? The power of a 16 core HP or Dell server running RouterOS would be fantastic.

If you have tested CHR and is happy with it why don't you install a hypervisor on the hardware? You can control drivers much better and you can use both VMware, Hyper-V and KVM for free. You will still get good performance and in case you want to seperate loads you can run several CHR on the same hardware. This is good in cases where ROS don't have multicore very well.

I think there are for more advantages running CHR then x86. If we are talking about performance there might be some impact but no major that I can think of.
At work we use a lot of Cisco ASA in dedicated Cisco hardware. In the next iteration of the datacenter we will move all these from Cisco hardware to a VM in VMware.
We can utilize the hardware better and remove hardware that is dedicated to one function.
In this case you should not use Windows 7 but install the free Hyper-V server or the Free VMWare ESX server. I like both of these are they are very minimal in install but it’s more or less CLI only.
Depending on what you are comfortable using there should be no major difference to which product you use.
I use Hyper-V at home and a CHR on this. At the moment I still use Hyper-V server 2012 R2 and not 2016 and version 6.37 release have an issue with synthetic network cards which you must use to get performance.
If you have no preference I would use VMware ESX and test with that.
The best part I like is snapshot and very easy migrations between hardware.
But if you still would like to use X86 have you tried to remove the RAID set (my guess is that you use RAID1) and build a new one. That should remove all traces of the previous install.

If it's a 6.37 bug, maybe you can re-install older version like 6.34.
If it works, buy the licence, and then upgrade do 6.37.

same problem here
fresh install on pen drive
version 6.37.1
dell 710

same problem here

Did you read and do what is written above?