Environment
LANDesk Management Suite 8.7 and 8.8, any platform
Problem/Issue/Symptoms
The online activation process of a LANDesk Management Suite 8.7 or 8.8 core server fails.
Cause
Since the recent update of the back end licensing system at LANDesk, the old core servers running the end of life Management Suite version 8.7 and 8.8 are not able to activate themselves on line anymore.
These versions of the LANDesk Management Suite have reached their end of life date and must be upgraded to a supported version as soon as possible.
Product Availability and Support for LANDesk Products can be found here:
http://www.landesk.com/services-support/product-availability.aspx
Solution
1. Open a support case with LANDesk, starting from the following address: http://support.landesk.com/
2. The Technical Support Engineer, together with the Licensing Team, will set up a set of credentials recognized by the licensing system as related to an 8.7 LANDesk Management Suite Core. This will make the new licensing system to bounce the activation file to the old backend, so the core can still be recognized and activated.
Once you have your new set of credentials, specifically set for your core, you can proceed with a standard off-line core activation.
3. To successfully activate your core off-line, you must prevent it to communicate on line with the licensing http address of LANDesk, which is http://license.landesk.com.
To do so, edit your %windir%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file, associating the host license.landesk.com to a private IP address that you know is not reachable by your core server, e.g.:
10.255.255.1 license.landesk.com
4. Make sure your Core Server Activation window is not set to use any proxy, opening the proxy pane as in the screenshot:
5. Follow the standard off-line activation procedure you can find in the Manually Activating the Core Server section of this article: http://community.landesk.com/support/docs/DOC-2108
6. The off-line activation procedure has to be followed at every activation, which usually is required every 90 days.
At the time of writing, it is not possible to activate an 8.7 and 8.8 core on-line anymore.