[c-nsp] ISR G2 Licenses - Permanent vs Right To Use

[Reuben Farrelly]

On 28/11/2012 10:52 PM, Steve McCrory wrote:
> Hi Group,
>
> We've had a complaint from a customer that their security license on a
> 1941K9 is showing as Right To Use when they are expecting it to show
> Permanent:
>
> Index 2 Feature: securityk9
>
>           Period left: Life time
>           License Type: RightToUse
>           License State: Active, In Use
>           License Count: Non-Counted
>           License Priority: Low
>
> We've had this checked with our distributor who shipped us the router
> pre-installed with the required license and they are happy that Right To
> Use is correct. They even raised it with Cisco and they came back
> quoting the Wassenaar Arrangement.
>
> Can someone clear up the difference between the two terms as the Cisco
> literature on the subject is confusing and our customer is like a dog
> with a bone over this.

RightToUse (RTU) license are licenses that essentially are just honor 
based, ie you can freely use the features providing you have purchased 
the license, and there is no enforcement of the featureset on or off. 
This is basically how Cisco has historically licensed IOS for many years.

Permanent licenses are ones where a license key has been imported into 
the router IOS and are based on a cryptographic license key file.  These 
are node-locked licenses and tied to the serial number of the chassis. 
With a bit of messing around these can be transferred if you do an RMA.

If you've paid for and are entitled to a given featureset then yes, you 
should be getting what is called a Product Activation Key (PAK), which 
in turn you enter in to www.cisco.com/go/license, which then spits out a 
tiny license key file that you install on the router.  This then shows 
up as a 'permanent' license in the IOS.  Either that, or the license is 
pre-installed at the factory in which case it will show as a permanent 
license out of the box.  This is how it normally works, I've had dozens 
of routers shipped to us from our distributor that are done this way.

Cisco went down the path of enforcing licensing (ie permanent licenses, 
no RTU) on some newer IOS platforms but did a fast backpedal in a 
15.0/15.1 maintenance rebuild of IOS.  Presumably a few people seriously 
objected to it and the messing around involved in processing licenses, 
and Cisco realised it probably was causing more pain and lost sales than 
it was worth.  So pretty much across the board in so far as branch 
routers now we're back to where we started, ie honor based RTU licenses 
where the real proof of entitlement is a purchase order proving you've 
bought the license :-)

Reuben