LFDS primary license auto-renewal failure bug/hotfix notice

posted on May 27, 2021 • Show version history

Hi all, this is a PSA about KB 1014288 - The Laserfiche Directory Server's primary license automatic renewal is not successful. While this information is posted on the Support site, I'm cross-posting it here for visibility.

Who is affected: Any customer using LFDS 10.4.4, 10.4.5 or 11.0 with any subscription component to their license (e.g. Rio w/ Participant users)

Issue: The primary license autorenewal feature (based on expiration) fails. The Automatic Renewal Status always displays Unsuccessful.

Impact: Partial to full system outages when a customer's license expires and does not auto-renew

Recommended action: Apply the appropriate patch for LFDS 10.4.5 or 11.0 from KB 1014288, which involves swapping out LFDS.exe for an updated version. If the customer is on LFDS 10.4.4 (for which no patch is available), upgrade them to 10.4.5 or 11.0 and then apply the patch. This hotfix will likely be incorporated into the main packages next "patch Tuesday" in June.

If you know of affected customers (or are one), please let them know that they should patch their systems at the next convenient opportunity or prior to primary license expiration, whichever comes first.

You can check in Laserfiche Directory Server under Settings > General to see if subscription primary license automatic renewal is enabled. If you have a subscription license and do not have this feature enabled, we recommend enabling it (after patching).

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replied on May 27, 2021

How do we get a list of customers on this subscription licensing type?

Does the patch cause any downtime in other IIS applications?

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replied on May 27, 2021

Hi Chad, I'm not personally familiar with what views you have through the SP portal or elsewhere - I would reach out to your Laserfiche Sales contact. Any customer with Participant or Community User licenses is affected, as those always indicate a pure subscription or hybrid subscription primary license.

The patch does not cause any downtime in other IIS applications, as it only involves stopping and starting the LFDS.exe Windows Service. I would anticipate that users would be unable to perform new logins for approximately one minute. Existing sessions should be unaffected.

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replied on May 27, 2021

Thanks. That sounds good, if we can find this list then we can see if anyone is affected.

I know we had one server go down from a subscription license type in the past on the renewal date, and we never found a resolution with support, so this is likely what it was.

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replied on May 28, 2021

Chad, it affects any subscription type if they were relying on the primary license autorenewal. This includes partial subscription (subscription users) and full subscription.

What matters is the version of LFDS they were on.

The feature worked when initially released in 10.4.0 (Nov 2018) but broke when it was updated in 10.4.4 (July 2020).

We suspect it is the root cause of multiple unresolved support cases, since manually renewing fixes the issue and it worked for 2 years before breaking.

We are looking into releasing a proper patch soon so that customers downloading version 11 do not get the unpatched issue.

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LFDS primary license auto-renewal failure bug/hotfix notice

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