Don’t you just hate losing time at a clients because a third party product doesn’t work? I do, and this happened to me today.

I was a clients to renew their a XenServer license expiring in several days (not taking into account that this could have be done from our offices). For those who don’t know, this is a fairly straightforward procedure. When opening up your XenCenter, a popup alerts you of near expiration.

But why have things work great when you can pull some hair out? The Citrix licensing servers were simple not responding to http requests. Ping worked fine (not necessarily an indication), but other than that, nothing. I tried to update from 5.5 to 5.6, which change the default page loaded, which worked, but redirected to the non working one.

Phone support is useless unless you have a support account (we use the free licenses because most of our clients only have on physical server). Tried several hotlines (Europe, France, Germany), but had to hang up because the client didn’t possess a contract number.

Looking through the knowledge base didn’t get me far either, except some dead community driven IRC (can’t blame em, it was 2PM here, so 8 AM in new york). I tried several twitter accounts, but none of them reported a crash or anything.

I finally found a forum post, dating back a month ago, where it is said the license server was sometimes simply shut down during the night. Somewhat surprising such a server – for any server actually.  Anyway, spent 45 minutes at a client for coming to the conclusion  the server crashed (actually took about 5 minutes), and for concluding that Citrix still has some major communication problems when errors occur.

Edit: The server is now responding with 404 errors. Maybe it wasn’t simply shut down?