Production postmortemThe evil licensing code

time to read 3 min | 496 words

A customer gave us a call about a failure they were experiencing in their production environment. They didn’t install the license that they purchased for some reason, and when they tried to install that, RavenDB will not run.

There is what this looked like:

image

Once I had all those details, it was pretty easy to figure out what was going on. I asked the client to send me the Raven.Server.exe.config file, just to verify it, and sure enough, here are the problematic lines:

<add key="Raven/AnonymousAccess" value="Admin"/>
<add key="Raven/Licensing/AllowAdminAnonymousAccessForCommercialUse" value="false" />

This is the default configuration, and this failure is actually the expected and desired behavior.

What is going on? This customer was running RavenDB in a development mode, without a license. That means that the server is open to all. When you install a license, that is a pretty strong indication that you are using RavenDB in production. It is actually common to see users installing the development mode in production, and registering the license at a later date, for various reasons.

The problem with that is that this means that at least for a while, they were running with “everyone is admin” mode, which is great for development, but horrible for production. If you install RavenDB for production usage (by providing a license during the setup process), it will set itself up in locked down mode, so only users explicitly granted access can get to it. But if you started at development installation, then added the license…

It is common for customers to forget or actually be unaware of that setting. And not setting it is going to end up with a production installation that is open to the whole wide world.

When that happens, that tend to be… bad. Over 30,000 instances that are wide open bad.

Because of that, if you are running a license, and you had previously installed the development mode, you need to make a choice. Either you setup anonymous access so only authorized people can access the database, or you explicitly decided to grant everyone access, likely because you are already running in secured environment.

Error reporting from services is a bit hard, because there is no good way to send error messages to the service managers. But in the event log, we can see the actual error with the full details.

image

More posts in "Production postmortem" series:

  1. (12 Dec 2023) The Spawn of Denial of Service
  2. (24 Jul 2023) The dog ate my request
  3. (03 Jul 2023) ENOMEM when trying to free memory
  4. (27 Jan 2023) The server ate all my memory
  5. (23 Jan 2023) The big server that couldn’t handle the load
  6. (16 Jan 2023) The heisenbug server
  7. (03 Oct 2022) Do you trust this server?
  8. (15 Sep 2022) The missed indexing reference
  9. (05 Aug 2022) The allocating query
  10. (22 Jul 2022) Efficiency all the way to Out of Memory error
  11. (18 Jul 2022) Broken networks and compressed streams
  12. (13 Jul 2022) Your math is wrong, recursion doesn’t work this way
  13. (12 Jul 2022) The data corruption in the node.js stack
  14. (11 Jul 2022) Out of memory on a clear sky
  15. (29 Apr 2022) Deduplicating replication speed
  16. (25 Apr 2022) The network latency and the I/O spikes
  17. (22 Apr 2022) The encrypted database that was too big to replicate
  18. (20 Apr 2022) Misleading security and other production snafus
  19. (03 Jan 2022) An error on the first act will lead to data corruption on the second act…
  20. (13 Dec 2021) The memory leak that only happened on Linux
  21. (17 Sep 2021) The Guinness record for page faults & high CPU
  22. (07 Jan 2021) The file system limitation
  23. (23 Mar 2020) high CPU when there is little work to be done
  24. (21 Feb 2020) The self signed certificate that couldn’t
  25. (31 Jan 2020) The slow slowdown of large systems
  26. (07 Jun 2019) Printer out of paper and the RavenDB hang
  27. (18 Feb 2019) This data corruption bug requires 3 simultaneous race conditions
  28. (25 Dec 2018) Handled errors and the curse of recursive error handling
  29. (23 Nov 2018) The ARM is killing me
  30. (22 Feb 2018) The unavailable Linux server
  31. (06 Dec 2017) data corruption, a view from INSIDE the sausage
  32. (01 Dec 2017) The random high CPU
  33. (07 Aug 2017) 30% boost with a single line change
  34. (04 Aug 2017) The case of 99.99% percentile
  35. (02 Aug 2017) The lightly loaded trashing server
  36. (23 Aug 2016) The insidious cost of managed memory
  37. (05 Feb 2016) A null reference in our abstraction
  38. (27 Jan 2016) The Razor Suicide
  39. (13 Nov 2015) The case of the “it is slow on that machine (only)”
  40. (21 Oct 2015) The case of the slow index rebuild
  41. (22 Sep 2015) The case of the Unicode Poo
  42. (03 Sep 2015) The industry at large
  43. (01 Sep 2015) The case of the lying configuration file
  44. (31 Aug 2015) The case of the memory eater and high load
  45. (14 Aug 2015) The case of the man in the middle
  46. (05 Aug 2015) Reading the errors
  47. (29 Jul 2015) The evil licensing code
  48. (23 Jul 2015) The case of the native memory leak
  49. (16 Jul 2015) The case of the intransigent new database
  50. (13 Jul 2015) The case of the hung over server
  51. (09 Jul 2015) The case of the infected cluster