Everything works without activation. You do not need to activate system for it to work.
you DO see the difference in the screens between activated and non activated, yes ?
non activated, there is no way in the GUI to get to those functions - reboot the system, power it off, notification settings, network settings… none of those work as they do not exist to even click on them.
Sorry for not coming back. I tried to install everything again and got into trouble. After installation is complete it reports it cannot start Apache.
I tried two times with the same result. Same machine, same procedure as the first time.
Well, maybe I skipped that activation step thinking it is just advertisement for commercial version. I cannot check it now as I cannot successfully finish installation.
Is there any sort of delay on your network, especially during startup of devices ? For example, a slow DHCP server, an IP conflict, spanning tree (STP), etc. ?
One kind of “hack” to eliminate some network issues like this would be to start the installation with the network cable unplugged. This should force the entering of static IP information (in any Debian install - this is not a FreePBX 17 specific thing.) After you set the IP, then reconnect the cable, and continue on with the rest of the install.
No commercial modules work without activation, including sysadmin. Everything else does.
I could not say. My network works fine.
As I tried to install FreePBX again and again (unsuccessfully) I found out that with each installation, it gets different IP from DHCP even if I assigned IP to the machine in DHCP server. It is like installation sets different MAC each time instead of using native.
I am not keen to set fixed IP, especially as this is test machine. I have to finally install this on the cloud where I cannot disable internet access.
I managed to make FreePBX work as expected using manual install (Debian and then running script). It seems SNGDEB-PBX17-amd64-12-8-0-2503-1.iso is faulty.
Activation showed up and after some fiddling I managed to activate installation.
Do you have multiple network interfaces ?
You are testing on physical then moving to production on virtual ? That can potentially introduce a lot of changes.
Machine does have ethernet and WiFi interface but WiFi is not used. However, I repeated installation six times and each time I ended up with different MAC.
No, I am not planning to move just to test if planned configuration would work. i would install it and set up on VM from scratch.
Curious what happens if you disable the wifi in your BIOS - this would be closer to a cloud setup as well.
Different MAC addresses each time - are you installing this as a VM ? Destroying the VM and then recreating it and building it again ? the (virtual) hardware would determine the MAC address.
No, it is on physical machine.