SOPHOS UTM: Use hardware appliances with home / software license

This is not a supported configuration by Sophos

Normally when you get an old hardware Appliance, ex. UTM 220, 320 etc, you cannot use this in your home environment (With your free home license), without paying for a hardware license.

This can be “solved”, by making the hardware installation think, it’s going software

The steps are listed here:

1. Take a backup of your running UTM configuration in WebAdmin, if you have such running at the moment.
2. Download the hardware image for appliances, theese starts with “SSI” in the file name. (Google “Download Sophos UTM”)
3. Burn this to a CD-rom or to USB following this link. (This will format the harddrive of the appliance, so logs and stats are lost!)
4. Install the hardware appliance as you would do normally.
5. After installation, you now have a complete clean Sophos UTM 9 installation.
6. Connect a VGA screen and a USB keyboard to the appliance.
7. At the login prompt: login as root – it will tell you to change password, just do that (Old password is <blank>).
8. When you’re logged in, do this:
   “vi /etc/asg”
   delete the “ASG_ID….”-entry in the file and save and close
9. Reboot

Now the UTM will boot running software license, and you can use your home license with it

This workaround will not swap interface names, and if you have one of the bigger models, 220 and beyond, with LCD, then will this just work as it did with hardware config – software installations do not have support for the LCD driver – but this way it works.

Happy UTM’ing