How does the phoning home work if they're on a network that doesn't route to the internet, or where the route to the internet is heavily firewalled? Or does it use a license server? Or is there some other procedure for refreshing the license in that situation? Or can you just not use these routers for that?
Typically (a) they whitelist a route to the licensing servers (e.g. enterprise, "soft" disconnected) or (b) there's a manual, airgap tolerant authentication procedure that must be performed regularly (e.g. generate key from licensing servers, save, move across gap, upload to hardware).
No idea what Cisco does specifically, but I've worked with other gear or software that worked like this.
One pulls the key off the network element, plugs that into a website which produces an authorization key which can then be cut and pasted into the network element.
jesus. in the age of cloud computing you copy/paste keys around :( this is just sad and makes me believe that you'd have to be borderline insane to choose cisco for anything that is started from scratch today.
