Product becomes deactivated after OS upgrade

Hi,

We have an end user who's found that their product has become deactivated after they upgraded the operating system on their machine - they then had to reactivate using the product key (which the LimeLM server saw as a separate activation).

My guess is that there's some files containing the activation information that were wiped out in the upgrade - does this sound right and if so, is there something we can do about it or something we can advise people to do to avoid this in the future?

Thanks,Ian

The user did more than just upgrade the OS, correct? They also changed RAM or swapped out a harddrive? TurboActivate allows for fuzzy-matching small changes to computers, but if customers change a whole lot of their machine & base system software at once, then TurboActivate sees it as a separate machine.

Does that make sense?

Hi Wyatt,

That definitely makes sense, but they say they're not changing anything about their hardware configuration. The other strange thing is that the new activation does not show up on our LimeLM page for their product key - for instance, they had it happen again this morning and sent me the logs showing that they had to run the activation key again, but on our end it shows only that they activated the product back on April 11th. Shouldn't it update with the new activation date if they're running the activation process again?

Thanks,Ian

Oh, ok. No, everything is working as expected. When they upgraded their OS something deleted the activation files. They re-entered their product key and TurboActivate & LimeLM recognized it was the same computer.

Hi Wyatt,

They're telling me its happening on reboots now - they activate, it works, they reboot, and it says its not activated. Would this have to be something deleting the activation files when they reboot or is there something else that might be causing it?

Thanks,Ian

Yes, it sounds like something is deleting the activation files.

1. Are you using the latest version of TurboActivate? (Currently 3.4.4?)

2. Are you using TA_USER or TA_SYSTEM?

3. Is the customer doing anything special with their machine? That is, is it a VM instance, or some sort of funky configuration?

4. Is the customer running some "helpful" cleaning tool that removes files/registry/etc.?

Hi Wyatt,

Answers below:

1. Are you using the latest version of TurboActivate? (Currently 3.4.4?)

We're currently on 3.4.3, but plan to upgrade soon.

2. Are you using TA_USER or TA_SYSTEM?

We're using TA_SYSTEM.

3. Is the customer doing anything special with their machine? That is, is it a VM instance, or some sort of funky configuration?

It's two nodes on one server, each running a licensed instance of our software under Ubuntu.

4. Is the customer running some "helpful" cleaning tool that removes files/registry/etc.?

I asked and they claim not to be.

Thanks,Ian

They're still having the issue occur on restart of the servers. Could this be due to having two nodes running on the same set of hardware, perhaps? Maybe it just makes more sense to generate them a separate license key for each activation?

Thanks,Ian

Could this be due to having two nodes running on the same set of hardware, perhaps?

Yes, I think that's the problem.

Maybe it just makes more sense to generate them a separate license key for each activation?

Yes, you should try that. Also, can you send me the product key in question. Send it to wyatt@wyday.com.

Reply
Discard post