In this article, you can find details about FastNetMon’s licensing implementation.
When you install FastNetMon for the first time, it uses your external and internal IPs (if you use NAT) and information about hardware to generate a license and store it in /etc/fastnetmon/license.lic.
It uses the following hardware details:
- CPU model
- Number of logical CPUs
If you change any of these hardware options, FastNetMon will issue a new license automatically (you need to have an active Internet connection) when you change it a reasonable number of times (a few times per week). If you change it more often, our support team will contact you. We may limit the number of allowed hardware assignment changes.
If you’re thinking about changing the external or internal IP address, please create a ticket for our support team before taking action. Any IP-related changes will break the license allocation process.
For license usage monitoring reasons and product usage survey, all editions of FastNetMon send the following information to stats (stats.fastnetmon.com) server.
FastNetMon Advanced does not send any PCAP dumps, hosts in your network or any other sensitive information to our servers.
For all production licenses on a monthly or annual billing cycle, our licensing server issues licenses only for 14 days. Every day FastNetMon contacts the licensing server and extends it for one more day until end of per paid period.
During automatic license extension, check the following log messages in /var/log/fastnetmon/fastnetmon.log:
[INFO] Start automatic license refresh process [INFO] External IP address of this server: aa.bb.cc.dd [INFO] We have license for: 14 days [INFO] Correctly received and checked license [INFO] We store license on disk
To check license status, use this fcli command:
sudo fcli show license Production license for 10000 mbits valid until 2023-03-29
There is an option to manually extend the license to check that it will work fine after configuration or routing change:
sudo fcli set renew_license
If your license was suspended or cancelled previously, you will need to restart FastNetMon to fetch the license:
sudo fcli commit
If your machine does not have external connectivity, we can allocate an offline license, which does not require a connection to the licensing server. If you need this type of license, please discuss it with the sales team. These licenses are subject to additional security checks for the company and can be issued only for annual licenses starting from FastNetMon 100G.
To generate such a license, we will need a hardware fingerprint, which can be generated this way:
sudo fcli show license_hardware_data > hw_data.lic
After this, please send it to our support or sales team, and we will provide a license file which should be put to /etc/fastnetmon/license.lic.
After placing the license file there, you will need to restart FastNetMon this way:
sudo fcli commit
And then check license status:
sudo fcli show license
Please be aware that after offline license expiration, FastNetMon will stop working, and even if you have an active subscription with us, you will need to reach us to generate a new license. If you change CPU model, number of CPUs or amount of memory, it will stop working too, as the license is based on these parameters.
We recommend adding a calendar event a few weeks before license expiration.