Activation Manager cannot see active internet connection

Cubase
1

I’ve been using Steinberg Licencing for a fair while, and generally without issue. But tonight… things are not working for me.

Just upgraded to Halion 7, so needed to activate this licence. It wasn’t present in Activation manager on my main DAW (I’d already activated it on my macbook), and Activation Manager wouldn’t update, so I thought I’d sign out and back in again as that has fixed problems in the past.

I can’t sign back in. Activation Manager loads (slowly), and gives me the ‘sign in’ dialogue. Whenever I click it, I get this:

activation manager cannot sign in

I have an active internet connection on this machine. The macbook is on the same network / connection, and doesn’t have a problem signing in.

Earlier in the evening, I couldn’t get elicenser to update on the main DAW either, so I ended up doing the licence upgrade on the macbook. These two issues may be related.

The curl command I’ve seen elsewhere:

curl https://entitlements.steinberg.net/.well-known/jwks.json

Works in terminal and gives what appears to be a valid response:

StatusDescription :
Content           : {"keys": [{
                      "kty": "RSA",
                      "e": "AQAB",
                      "kid": "PPrvRDb4JuJxtCgGKyf6tA==",
                      "n": "6Ny2oVu-DJ3PA5YUUpTABcwMKzH8kaLVQVrzapZpdFz3oLsW1QESi1YlTS8ITic-IdxUrj861dMWPWDX9vFI4DuDw4b
                    KnrPcZdOS7qKLw0ByhoJU...
RawContent        : HTTP/1.1 200
                    Connection: keep-alive
                    Content-Length: 776
                    Content-Type: application/json;charset=UTF-8
                    Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2023 21:14:21 GMT
                    Set-Cookie: AWSALB=OzpBm00ALU40pcPw+3sMBOkp959j5yG7Yr3BRZ...
Forms             : {}
Headers           : {[Connection, keep-alive], [Content-Length, 776], [Content-Type, application/json;charset=UTF-8],
                    [Date, Mon, 20 Feb 2023 21:14:21 GMT]...}
Images            : {}
InputFields       : {}
Links             : {}
ParsedHtml        : mshtml.HTMLDocumentClass
RawContentLength  : 776

I’ve tried uninstalling Activation Manager, restarting, etc. I now have a main DAW that I can’t use Cubase on, which is less than ideal to say the least.

2

As usual, this does little to correct things, since the user settings remain.

Try deleting the contents of the User Settings Data folder for the Activation Manager. On Win it’s %appdata%\Steinberg\Activation Manager

I suppose on Mac it’s in ~/Library/…

This will initialize the SAM. Then you should try to login anew, and check if that resolved the problem.

3

Yeah, should have put that I’ve done that, sorry. Deleted all of the stuff in there before one of the installs. Didn’t change anything, alas.

4

What path specifically did you delete from?

5

The one mentioned - %APPDATA%\Steinberg\Activation Manager

6

Oh. You’re on Windows?

There’s also a dir with settings (or something) in Local.

You’re not giving much in the way of details, so I’ll mention to change the default browser, preferably one that’s in initialized state.

But maybe this is not a Steinberg software probelm.

7

It’s not getting to the point of launching the browser, though. The sign-in button (which would launch the browser and then go to the account, etc) isn’t functioning as it doesn’t try to launch the site; it’s acting as if there’s no internet connection. But there is - both on this machine, and on another one which can connect to SAM (illustrating that there’s no problem with the internet or content blocking, etc).

It is a Steinberg software issue. Everything else works fine.

8

do you by any chance block the windows process lsass.exe from internet access (if you ever monitor the stpendous amount of traffic that thing sends out you should be blocking it)… i found that Steinberg licenser doesn’t like that… so temporary unblock it when needing to activate, and immediatley block it again afterwards

9

No, it’s not blocked.

10

I have this exact same problem. Did you solve it

11

Whatever it was, it fixed itself about a week later. I gave up and tried it later on and then it worked, so it was something Steinberg-ey that magically resolved itself.

12

Oh dear, computer magic.

Thanks for responding so quickly