This post is the rambling of a pissed off user in regards to CHR license and ~16 lost hours.
Have a Supermicro server that was in dire need of a good cleaning and ESXI reinstall.
This server has a CHR for routing (no NAT) and some VMs inside ESXI. Nothing fancy.
So I decided I would do this during weekend to minimize the downtime.
Took everything apart and gave it a good clean.
Replaced all ethernet and DAC patch cables with new ones.
Updated the BIOS to the latest version and procedeed to reinstall ESXI 8.
ESXI config from scratch. Nothing imported beside the actual VMs.
All VMs including the CHR one were imported without a problem and everything seemed to be fine.
But...while testing the various bits and pieces I dicovered I had huge packet loss as soon as any traffic over 100KB/s passed through this sever.
I started testing, tweaking, reinstalling and all the blah blah to no avail.
~16 hours in, my lonely neuron was starting to crash and I thought I should disable CHR and put a RB1100AHx4.
Logged in to the CHR to pull the config and was lucky enough to click the License submenu by mistake. Lo and behold, the darn license was missing!
Logged in to Mikrotik to get the license and just like that, the problem was fixed!
Now, I have no clue as to why a functioning CHR instance with a valid P unlimited license would deactivate out of the blue, but it would be extra nice if the freaking thing would throw a warning somewhere in the logs, the top bar of WInbox or even better, as a popup mesage once a user logs in Winbox.
Something like this maybe
Now, I know a lot of people will state it is my own damn fault for not checking the license, but given that I fully disasembled the server and reinstalled ESXI, I was 100% sure I did something wrong on the hardware/virtualization/cabling part.
The CHR license problem did not even cross my mind for a split second.
So pretty please with sugar on top, if any Mikrotik staff sees this, consider implementing some sort of warning when there is no license on CHR and/or when the license gets disabled/removed for....reasons.