[German]I'm not sure if this affects anyone in the readership. Do you have Citrix Netscaler (ADC) installations that show a "Freemium" license status after an upgrade? Citrix has published an advisory as of November 8, 2022, but it was deleted as of November 9, 2022. However, there is a discussion on the Citrix forum about this very bug. And I got a comment in my German blog post, where a reader was hit with that issues on 3 systems. Here is some information about it.
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It's a strange story: The vendor Citrix published an advisory CTX474060 on November 8, 2022 with the title After upgrading the ADCs to 13.1 33.x, the license status shows freemium, but deleted it one day later. In the Citrix forum I found this entry from October 2022 about the problem.
ADC license not valid after upgrading to 13.1 33.47
Well I just upgraded my ADC HA pair (VPX) to 13.1 33.47 . Both instances lost it's license. I checked the MAC address and if the license is still valid. It's a match and it's valid. Luckily this is in my test environment only.
WARNING: If you need to upgrade please do a staged upgrade and check the license afterwards.
Already opened a support case.
A user wrote that the date in the license file was incorrect and therefore the license was not found. Carl Stahlhood addressed it on Twitter (that's where I noticed it).
Thorsten E. also picked up on this in the following tweet and linked to the Citrix ADC Advisory.
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However, the linked post in this tweet can no longer be found at Citrix – it was deleted again as of Nov. 9, 2022. However, I have found the post in the Internet archive.
After upgrading the ADCs to 13.1 33.x, the license status shows freemium
Symptoms or Error
- After upgrading the ADCs to 13.1 33.x, the license status shows freemium
- The host id and the expiry date are still valid
- Checking the license file from cd /nsconfig/license, shows the below invalid date
The problem: After upgrading the ADCs (Netscaler) to 13.1 33.x, the license status shows Freemium. Even if the license expiration date is valid, the same license file cannot be used for the current firmwares. The date specified in the license file should be greater than the firmware release date in order to use the current firmware, Citrix wrote in the advisory.
The solution is to save a new license with the updated date in the affected path. Affected customers will need to contact the Citrix licensing/technical support team for licensing assistance, if needed. Why Citrix deleted the support post again is beyond my knowledge.
