How do I render linked blender files with a render farm?

So I was working on an animation which I linked some characters from another blend file, proxied the armature, then animated the character. At first I was going to render it on my computer, but later decided to test the free render farms.

I figured I had to ‘pack’ the image files, and ‘make local’ (L) all the objects in the scene in order to put everything in one blend file. But once I [make local > all] the characters weren’t deformed by the proxied armatures anymore.

I think I did something wrong here. Or maybe this hasn’t been implemented in blender yet?

Any advice/workarounds on this issue would be great!

pic not related