Recently we have been receiving some reports of end-users in China being blocked from accessing the Zentitle license servers (IP address 184.106.60.185) - note this appears to be done at the ISP level rather than China-wide.
As a result, it would be helpful for us to understand which specific ISPs within China appear to be implementing this block - so if you could ask your end-customers as they experience any accessibility issues who their ISP is and provide that information to our support team, it would be most appreciated. Also, if your local staff could ask the ISPs in question why the IP address is being blocked, that would also be extremely helpful.
Here are the current workarounds to resolve this issue for this subset of end-users:
- End-users have had success using a VPN to tunnel to either another location within China that is not impacted by an ISP block, or outside of China. This is typically the easiest solution to address the issue, and is something that most users within China are familiar with.
- Use offline activation: The offline activation portal (activationportal.me) resolves to the same IP address as the main licensing service (IP address 184.106.60.185) and thus the same blockages would apply. In order to work around this, an affected user could generate the offline activation request certificate, email that to the vendor’s support team who can then activate the machine on their behalf - then email back the license certificate to them in order to complete the offline activation sequence.
Note: this offline activation approach works both for individual node-locked licenses as well as offline activation of network-based licenses within the Zentitle LAN Daemon - which then allows floating licensing, element pools, floating features, etc. all to be used within the application.
- Hong Kong Relay Server: We have hosted a new relay server in a Hong Kong datacenter at IP address 119.9.127.11. If your software supports the standard mechanism within Zentitle to handle proxies, then the user can set their proxy address to 119.9.127.11 (port 80) and use that to redirect back to our standard servers.
Note that Chinese law prohibits the hosting of the relay server within Mainland China - and the relay server IP address may in the future also be blocked by one or more China-based ISPs.
If you use HTTPS, please contact Nalpeiron Support with your FileChk library settings so that we can build a custom HTTPS-enabled library with the relay server IP address embedded within.
- Experimental Email Automated Responder: We are internally developing an automated email based server so that end-users who wish to use the offline activation approach can simply email the offline activation request certificate to an automated attendant which will then perform the requested activation on their behalf. It will then automatically email the end-user back with the license certificate that they can then use to complete the offline activation sequence. Let us know if you would like to look at deploying this solution to your affected end-users.
Any feedback on these workarounds and how they are working out for both you and your end-customers are welcome. Please send such feedback to us through the standard Nalpeiron support ticketing system.