I’ve a FreePBX distro installed on Azure VM via the Azure Marketplace and There is auto shutdown/startup which has been enabled for the VM’s, and this happens everyday.
Recently observed FreePBX was deactivated at random, and had to reset the hardware lock on the portal with the deployment ID, now PBX stands Active.
Does frequent restarts of the PBX locks the Hardware and enters into an Inactivated state?
Anyhow we just have a maximum of 2 resets per deployment id, post 2 resets not sure how this can be handled.
Is it a issue to shutdown/startup FreePBX VM, how can we avoid such random deactivation which occur without any manual intervention.
What is the purpose of the auto shutdown and startup?
It’s likely that the virtual hardware configuration is changing because of this, specifically the eth0 MAC address.
Stopping and starting the instance like this is unlikely to be a supported configuration. You could possibly do this if you are not going to activate FreePBX.
As @billsimon mentioned your system has a hardware ID. If the hardware changes on your virtual machine the hardware ID will change and your license becomes invalid.
Thanks for your valuable response.
But the MAC address remains Static and for saving PAYG on the cloud we stop and start the VM’s.
As per Azure: “Azure assigns the MAC address to your NIC, if you destroy your VM you cannot designate the preferred MAC address like you would an IP address. But…there’s a workaround…when you delete a virtual machine in Azure, the disks and NIC are left behind. We could have easily just re-deployed a new virtual machine, using the former disks and NICs. That way the MAC address wouldn’t change and we wouldn’t have to reinstall our software.”
There is probably more to the machine identification than just the eth0 MAC address. But that information is not published, so I don’t know what other characteristics of the Azure VM you would need to preserve to avoid losing your activation. It would be a question for Sangoma to answer, if they are willing.
Are you using any commercial modules? If not, then do not worry about the activation.
Yes the Mac is the most common failure point and that is because zendguard only lets you choose the first device. I will say run dmidecode and anything in there can be used to fingerprint the machine.
It is still beta but you could try 16 it uses ioncube
