My License horror story
Hello,
I wanted to share the most awful experience I had today....
This morning one of our servers became unstable and eventually unreachable. It happens. The server was power-cycled but did not come online again. The credentials for remote access were not working, so I contacted the data center who within the hour provided me with working credentials and informed me the machine was stuck in the RAID configurator with 3 out 4 disks marked as bad. Attempts to reassemble the array were... futile.
Lessons learned: I still hate MegaRAID.
Obviously we keep plenty of backups which I promptly copied to on of our newer servers (yay, free upgrade). I launched some commands to restore the accounts from small to large, effectively bringing my customers websites back online. That was working great, until after about 30 accounts I started getting license errors. Oh sh*t.
Lessons learned: I blame cPanel for this one, I'll explain why at the end.
It turns out my data center converted all my existing yearly, unlimited licenses to Premier Metal licenses. I'm aware of the recent license changes obviously but I was under the impression that yearly licenses remained valid and the data center didn't inform me about the conversion. Now, I'm able to purchase an upgraded license trough their control panel but it's limited at a certain amount, it turns out. To upgrade the license to a 400 for example, I need to contact sales. Sales... does not work on Sunday. No one at the tech support could help me.
Lessons learned: I was literally speechless about this one. The internet is closed on Sunday.
If the data center can't provide me a license, surely I can just buy one directly with cPanel. I didn't do that. I went to... buycpanel. They are expensive but the license will be there in seconds, surely, it's their core business. I placed my order and waited. Waited for some "pending verification". I contacted them to expedite the order. Within one hour they said "sure, it's activated". It was not activated, something with a pending transfer. I had to contact them again 2 times to eventually get it sorted. buycpanel: you had one job to do...
Lessons learned: Don't be cheap in case of emergency.
I did contact cPanel in the mean time for a hail mary, I asked to either fix the new license from buycpanel if they found it or to pull some magic license out of their bag to help me out for a few days. They did respond pretty fast, the buycpanel license was installed a few minutes before I heard back from them.
Lessons learned: only have good experiences with cPanel tech support
I eventually got all my customers accounts restored and the "broken" server is reinstalled.
Lessons learned: keep a server on standby for emergencies (we usually have one).
The above scenario would never have happened with the old cPanel licenses. Now, I don't have an issue with paying a small amount for each account. Really, I don't. I sadly don't meet the criteria to be a Partner and purchase with a discount directly from cPanel. The price difference between the datacenter and cPanel is 50% so obviously I'm taking that route, I'm sure many here are purchasing discounted licenses.
For most part the datacenter is to blame here for such a poor implementation in their customer care. I will speak to them about it.
Dear cPanel, I believe there are however some simple things you could do as well:
- There is no place in WHM where you can actually see your license and status. This would have alerted me much easier to the license change situation. why not add this to the main page?
- There is no option in WHM to refresh the license. Give us a button :)
- Implement some emergency process from within WHM to get an "unlimited" license for a few days.
- Give the user control over any "license transfer". A button to do a transfer immediately for example.
Today I was at mercy of my data center, buycpanel and cPanel itself to keep my business going. I was not in control. It did not feel right.
Thanks for reading this to the end. Feel free to point out my mistakes as well and how I should have handled this better.
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I'm honestly surprised you were able to get the license migrated from your DC to buy panel (which is actually owned by cPanel now as I understand it.). This process usually takes a few days. Three of four drives cannot possibly fail at once. Does your DC monitor the raid status? In my experience one or more of those drives probably failed earlier. It's definitely important to use a DC that can provide what you need when you need it. 0 -
I'm honestly surprised you were able to get the license migrated from your DC to buy panel (which is actually owned by cPanel now as I understand it.). This process usually takes a few days.
Up until this morning I wasn't even aware there was a transfer process. I expected for the new license to just co-exist with the one from the DC and for the "highest" to count. Why does it need to take days, hours or even minutes? I'm surprised people just accept this.Three of four drives cannot possibly fail at once. Does your DC monitor the raid status? In my experience one or more of those drives probably failed earlier.
The drives themselves didn't really fail, I was left with 1 "good" and 3 "bad" ones instead of a RAID10 array. The controller picked up on a "foreign" configuration but was unable to reinstate it. As I didn't know the exact virtual disk configuration (stripe size, disk matching) I took a few guesses but didn't end up with a working end result. I opted to create a new RAID10 and reinstall the server at the end. First time ever I was in this situation.It's definitely important to use a DC that can provide what you need when you need it.
I was literally speechless when the guy on the chat told me "It's Sunday, sales is not here and I have no tools to help you". My plan for disaster recovery is usually to spread the accounts over other servers and have a spare server on standby. In this case I would need to overprovision each server with 100 cPanel licenses just to be prepared.0 -
I do get what you mean but since cPanel licenses are tied to an IP (instead of a key like say Plesk) the cPanel license system only allows one license per ip and if a partner tries to license an IP that is owned by a different partner the system kicks it back and initiates a transfer of the license from one partner to another. 0 -
Hi @WhiteDog Thanks for sharing your experiences and thoughts on the issue you experienced. I have some comments I'll add inline: - There is no place in WHM where you can actually see your license and status. This would have alerted me much easier to the license change situation. why not add this to the main page?
You're right, there's not, a license information page might be a neat interface to add, it's always been either your license was good or it wasn't and it can be checked at cPanel & WHM License Verification | cPanel, L.L.C., but something informational that told you how close you are to reaching your licenses limit as well as the amount of time until renewal might be nice and allow you to adequately prepare? Ultimately this is a feature request but I think its a REALLY good one and worth adding to the feature request site which is getting a lot more attention these days as a result of some internal communication and collaboration.- There is no option in WHM to refresh the license. Give us a button :)
Since you purchase from a reseller and they have all types of license costs/types I'm not sure this one would be feasible, you could have something that allowed you to directly renew a license if you'd purchased it from the store or were a partner but it wouldn't work so well for reseller purchased licenses.- Implement some emergency process from within WHM to get an "unlimited" license for a few days.
We don't do unlimited licenses like this and I don't think this is something that would be entertained due to the licensing structure but contacting support (in the event you have a license purchased through us) should allow you a few options in instances like this.- Give the user control over any "license transfer". A button to do a transfer immediately for example.
That is a lot more tricky than it sounds due to the way that licenses are attached to IP addresses. Partner licenses are transferrable through Manage2 but reseller purchased licenses wouldn't be manageable in the same manner. Ultimately, when you decide on a license reseller to purchase the license through, you'd need to ensure that they have support that would match your needs. Essentially they're responsible for their licenses, as well as determining how and when to provide support for issues with these and some of this sounds like dissatisfaction with the services the provider has. I do think the first suggestion is a fantastic idea and something we should look at now that we've changed the structure of licensing.0 -
Sorry should have been more clear on this one, I just meant to add a button that acts similar to the /usr/local/cpanel/cpkeyclt command.
That's a great idea as well, thanks for clarifying!But last time I checked, cPanel also has "business hours" so I don't think I can call you in the middle of the night to get a license issue sorted "immediately", correct? :-D
We're here 24/7! At least our support staff is :) I'm looking into the reasons behind some of the other items you noted, I'll get back to you when I have more information to add.0
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