Solved 3CX.co.uk FQDN deleted and license deactivated in portal - due to server inactivity?

[stormgoose]

I'm a 3CX Partner and have an NFR license of 3CX Enterprise installed. This was all active and working for a period of months. For security I won't advertise what the FQDN is, but the sake of this query let's say it was contoso.3cx.co.uk.

I currently use my NFR for testing new concepts internally to further my knowledge of the 3CX system before later rolling out ideas into production for my clients (who obviously have their own license and hardware). Subsequently, the 3CX server has been shut down for several months whilst I was not working on any 3CX related projects.

I fired it up a week or two back, and whilst in the management portal on the server is shows the contoso.3cx.co.uk FQDN as all good, and the license as all good, contoso.3cx.co.uk has been removed from 3CX's DNS. If I try and ping the hostname it doesn't exist. If I log into my Partner Portal it shows the 'Not Deployed' under the license details (where it once said activated, or something to that effect previously).

I have raised this with my regional sales manager, who has suggested that what I've described is not possible, even though it has happened. I'd like to know if others have experienced this behaviour? My sales manager stated .co.uk suffixed domains have been deprecated for new signups, and my wonder is that 3CX have quietly applied an agreesive policy of .co.uk FQDN deletion if a server does check in for a period of time. Does anyone have any thoughts or knowledge whether this is the case?

The sales guy also told me that in a restore operation I won't be able to reselect my old contoso.3cx.co.uk domain because of the deprecation. For my test setup this is a minor nuisance, but from a perspective of disaster recovery for my client who is using a 3cx.co.uk FQDN it could be disasterous. If a glitch in the system caused this kind of error for them (or the situation was triggered due to the phone server being down for some reason for a time) then not being able to restore back their 3cx.co.uk domain if 3CX had deleted it would be catastrophic for them.

Fundementally I'd like to get to the bottom of why this has happened to protect my client if nothing else. Look forward to any thoughts anyone has. Many thanks

 

[Alphabetic]

What is your partner status?

Are you Bronze or above?

 

[Evolute IT]

What is your partner status?

Are you Bronze or above?

Trainee. We see it below his username.

That shouldn't affect anything tho. Unless they passed the 6months of NFR before the sales target applies.

At that point, the NFR license would just fallback to Std 8SC like for affiliates.

 

[stormgoose]

Thanks for the replies - I appear to be exactly 6 months into being a Partner, and as I've only sold a 4 channel Enterprise License so far I think I'm a way off qualifying for Bronze (I think I'm right in remembering that I need to have made £2,500 sales in a year to get that status?) My Partner portal shows me now as 'Trainee Partner' with 365 days left, so that fits.

Looking in my panel the NFR keys are there and it doesn't seem to indicate there is any licensing issue. However if I go to manage the Enterprise license it tells me the following:

"This license key is registered to a version 18.0 currently not supported by PBX Express.
You may contact our customer service for further assistance."

It seems to me that the license is in a bit of limbo mode. I think something on 3CX's side has caused my DNS entry to be deleted and for the license to superficial appear like it's undeployed, at least initially, on the Partner portal - whilst still showing up as licensed and with my contoso.3cx.co.uk FQDN on the 3CX server installed itself. My strongest theory remains that this happened because my server didn't check in for some time - perhaps someone at 3CX ran a sweep for all .co.uk DNS A records that were considered stale (say hadn't been updated by my install for a month) and deleted them?

Is your thinking that this may somehow related specifically to the nature of the NFR license, and therefore my client has nothing to fear?

Many thanks

 

[NickD_3CX]

Hi @stormgoose ,

Could you please send me the first 8 digits of you NFR License Key that this happened to in a PM and I will try to see what happened exactly tomorrow and let you know.

 

[stormgoose]

Hi Nick,

That would be enormously useful, thank you. I'll do that in the next few mins.

Many thanks,

Bobby

 

[NickD_3CX]

For anyone else reading this post, I'll just point out what happened and what you need to know:

• Each 3CX installation, at certain intervals tries to contact the Activation Server (one of the reasons why 3CX requires an internet connection at all times)
• If our Activation Server does not see a PBX contact it in 60+ days, it will release the bound FQDN to the License Key. This is outlined here: https://www.3cx.com/docs/fqdn-management-allocation/#h.n6f0nt31g9xh
• If a FQDN is released due to the above, it can be rebound to your License Key by simply restarting your 3CX System Service on your PBX, as long as:
  - The key is still available and another user did not bind it to their key
  - The 3CX Domain is still available

Just to clarify, nothing will happen to your system if it fails to contact the Activation Server once or twice, but if it fails constantly for over 2 months, we consider it "offline".

 

[stormgoose]

Thank you Nick - I appreciate your time in replying and relaying this info for the benefit of the community. This was as I hypothesised to my account manager before asking this question on the forum.

When raising the above question with him, he answered: "An FQDN stays bound to a key indefinitely and can only be released from the key either via the customer or partner portal"

So thanks for clearing up that this isn't actually the case, that the server does need to check in at intervals to keep all good with the FQDN and that my original assertation was correct