Symptoms

After being upgraded to release 8.0, the NetScaler does not recognize the licenses installed. One indication is the output of show ns feature and show ns license, where all features are shown as not available. The issue could be reported as a licensing issue where no licenses appear to be installed.

License status:
Web Logging: NO
Surge Protection: NO
Load Balancing: NO
Content Switching: NO
Cache Redirection: NO
Sure Connect: NO
Compression Control: NO
Delta Compression: NO
Priority Queuing: NO
SSL Offloading: NO
Global Server Load Balancing: NO
GSLB Proximity: NO
Http DoS Protection: NO
Dynamic Routing: NO
Content Filtering: NO
Integrated Caching: NO
SSL VPN: NO
OSPF Routing: NO
RIP Routing: NO
BGP Routing: NO
Rewrite: NO
IPv6 protocol translation: NO
Application Firewall: NO
Responder: NO
HTML Injection: NO
Done

The /var/log/license.log file will look similar to the one shown below.

root@ns# cat license.log
17:54:58 (lmgrd) -----------------------------------------------
17:54:58 (lmgrd) Please Note:
17:54:58 (lmgrd)
17:54:58 (lmgrd) This log is intended for debug purposes only.
17:54:58 (lmgrd) In order to capture accurate license
17:54:58 (lmgrd) usage data into an organized repository,
17:54:58 (lmgrd) please enable report logging. Use Macrovision's
17:54:58 (lmgrd) software license administration solution,
17:54:58 (lmgrd) FLEXnet Manager, to readily gain visibility
17:54:58 (lmgrd) into license usage data and to create
17:54:58 (lmgrd) insightful reports on critical information like
17:54:58 (lmgrd) license availability and usage. FLEXnet Manager
17:54:58 (lmgrd) can be fully automated to run these reports on
17:54:58 (lmgrd) schedule and can be used to track license
17:54:58 (lmgrd) servers and usage across a heterogeneous
17:54:58 (lmgrd) network of servers including Windows NT, Linux
17:54:58 (lmgrd) and UNIX. Contact Macrovision at
17:54:58 (lmgrd) www.macrovision.com for more details on how to
17:54:58 (lmgrd) obtain an evaluation copy of FLEXnet Manager
17:54:58 (lmgrd) for your enterprise.
17:54:58 (lmgrd)
17:54:58 (lmgrd) -----------------------------------------------
17:54:58 (lmgrd)
17:54:58 (lmgrd)
17:54:58 (lmgrd) The license server manager (lmgrd) running as root:
17:54:58 (lmgrd) This is a potential security problem
17:54:58 (lmgrd) and is not recommended.
17:54:58 (lmgrd) Using license file "/usr/local/flexlm/licenses/license.dat"
lmstat - Copyright (c) 1989-2006 Macrovision Europe Ltd. and/or Macrovision Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
Flexible License Manager status on Tue 7/3/2007 17:55

Error getting status: Cannot find license file. (-1,359:2 "No such file or directory")
<end of license.log>

The system could be experiencing a problem finding the local system, rather than the issue normally associated with this error message (that is, the file is either not installed or is not in the correct location).

Cause

To recognize the license file, the system must be able to locate the localhost correctly. In some cases the hosts file from an earlier kernel installation does not have the correct hosts entries and causes the license files to be ignored on an upgraded 8.0 system.

Resolution

Before upgrading to 8.0, first make sure the license file is in the correct location. With release 8.0 all license files must be in the /nsconfig/license directory in order to be recognized.

Next, check the hosts files in /nsconfig and in /etc, and make sure both include lines for localhost and for the NetScaler name as defined in the configuration and /nsconfig/rc.conf. A properly configured hosts file should look similar to the following (using nshost as the example name defined for this NetScaler).

127.0.0.1    localhost
127.0.0.1    nshost

Status

The lmgrd subroutine is called and runs when the NetScaler starts. If there is a conflict of NetScaler host name in either the /nsconfig/hosts or /etc/hosts file, the lmgrd process skips reading the license files in the /nsconfig/license directory. This limitation requires modifications to the lmgrd subroutine, and requires involvement of Macrovision. Resolution to this limitation is being tracked by Issue 29909.

More Information

It is common to refer to the local system as localhost, which is associated with a loopback address (127.0.0.1). When a system needs to address its own IP address, it determines the IP address which resolves to the localhost name. Thus, putting the 127.0.0.1 localhost line into the hosts file allows the NetScaler to properly find its own IP address.