Server migrations involve copying of control panel as well.

Do you see the Directadmin License error even when you have the correct license?

It happens mainly because of an invalid server timestamp, mismatch in IP address, license expiry and many more.

At Bobcares, we often get requests from our customers to fix the Directadmin license error as part of our Server Migration Services.

Today, let’s see how our Migration Engineers fix license errors in Directadmin.

How does DirectAdmin license errors look?

Before going further, let’s have a quick look at when and how the license error shows up in DirectAdmin.

Basically, DirectAdmin throws errors during a new installation or when migrating licenses. For example, when migrating servers, we need to transfer the license as well.

A typical error message during server migration is:

You are not authorized to download the update package with that client id and license id for this IP address. Please email sales@directadmin.com.

The server owners panic and they become confused about what to do next?

That’s where our Migration Experts pitch in and make things working.

What causes license errors in DirectAdmin?

From our experience in managing servers, we’ve seen customers facing different kinds of problems in the Directadmin platform.

Now, let’s see the top causes of license error and how our Support Team solves them.

1. Unauthorized license

Recently, one of our clients had a problem with the Directadmin license. The user had started to install DirectAdmin before the ID is authorized. As a result, the setup process stopped with the below message:

Length: unspecified [text/html]
Saving to: “/usr/local/directadmin/update.tar.gz”

[ <=> ] 45 --.-K/s in 0s

2012-10-10 16:25:02 (2.02 MB/s) - “/usr/local/directadmin/update.tar.gz” saved [45]
You are not authorized to download the update package with that client id and license id for this IP address. Please email sales@directadmin.com".

On checking, we found that the DirectAdmin installation ended up with an error as the server doesn’t have a valid UID and LID.

Then, our Support Engineers suggested the customer wait until the Directadmin Sales authorized the ClientID and LicenseID for the new IP address.

Finally, we verified the license activation by doing a check at the DirectAdmin website. The successful results of a valid license show up as:

2. Invalid time on the server

The wrong time settings in the server may also cause this error. Thereby, the user not able to login to the server until we correct it.

1. Initially, our Support Engineers use the commands to identify the region as ls /usr/share/zoneinfo/

Then make use of  ls /usr/share/zoneinfo/<YOUR_REGION>  to identify the time zone which corresponds to the location.

2. After that, we create a symbolic link from the region time zone file to the time zone file.

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/<YOUR_REGION>/<YOUR_TIMEZONE> /etc/localtime

3. Then we run the command to set the time and date.

`date MMDDhhmmYYYY`

5. At last, we run the following command and then restart the DirectAdmin service.

/usr/local/directadmin/scripts/getLicense.sh <cid> <lic_id>
/etc/init.d/directadmin restart

That fixes the license error and DirectAdmin works normally.

3. Expiring license

Sometimes, Directadmin customers cant login into the control panel and may give the error as License has expired. This happens when the License is expired. So, we need to update your DirectAdmin license manually.

For that, our Support Engineers took the following steps to solve the problem.

Initially, we run the below command to update the license.

cd /usr/local/directadmin/scripts
./getLicense.sh <cid> <lic_id>
service directadmin restart

Here, cid and lic_id are the Client ID and License ID respectively.

Then we restart DirectAdmin with the following command

/etc/init.d/directadmin restart

That’s it.

[Need assistance to fix DirectAdmin license errors? We’ll help you.]

Conclusion

In short, DirectAdmin is a web-based hosting control panel used to manage the Linux servers. However, Directadmin license error may occur due to an invalid time on the server, mismatch in IP address or when a license has expired. Today, we saw the various reasons for License errors and how our Support Engineers fix them.