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

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