Unraid Trail License Horror Lockdown [Solved]

Hello everyone,

First of all, I'm new to Unraid and perhaps could have avoided the following horror story with the right information or a deeper dive into the documentation. Be that as it may, I'd like to share my experience and my convoluted solution with others, and maybe it will help other users or the Unraid developers.

I run several Proxmox nodes. Two of them run storage VMs (nominal and redundant for backups). I recently migrated both to Unraid after extensive testing. Although the migration did introduce some drawbacks, I was fairly certain I would stick with Unraid for the time being and make it my daily driver in this setup. Purchasing two Unleashed licenses was already planned, but I wanted to fully utilize the trial period.

Then came the first steps toward disaster:

For security reasons, I had to upgrade my OPNsense VM, which routes internet access and also provides the DHCP addresses. I thought I was on the safe side because I had a backup on my (unraid) storage.

Unfortunately, the OPNsense upgrade failed, which has never happened to me before. No worries, I'll just restore the backup.

The first attempt was extremely slow because the unraid storage mounts were incorrectly mounted and configured. So I reconfigured them and rebooted.

Then the backup storage stopped working altogether. O.O

At first, I thought, okay, no more DHCP, so I'll temporarily configure a static IP. So I did.

Then I realized that the unraid array wouldn't start anymore. Why? I thought you could get by with unraid for about 30 days without internet access? As I learned the hard way, that doesn't apply to the trial test licenses.

That means I had no internet, no working router or DHCP, and therefore my unraid backup storage completely refused to work, which is why I couldn't restore my backup from my router.

... After about a workday, here's the solution in a nutshell:

I configured all the necessary IPs statically.

I shared internet access from my phone to my notebook via tethering and then configured the notebook as a router.

Despite this, the free license couldn't be revived after this fiasco, and I was ultimately forced to install the Unleashed license. This didn't work at first, but after manually downloading the license file, pushing it to the server via SFTP, and using AI Tools, it eventually worked.

Then I was able to restore the router backup and gradually undo the changes.

The moral of the story:

Had I known that the Unraid test licenses were validated at each boot, I would never have embarked on this setup. I hope I won't have this kind of trouble with the Unleashed licenses.

However... To be continued with other unraid stories.