I’m trying to activate a Cubase 12 Pro Lincense in the Activation Manager (AM) on Win 10 on a PC with a working Internet Connection. AM reports the license can not be activated because of a missing internet connection. However, there is a working Internet Connection.
What is working:
Activating the License on a different PC in the same LAN Segment (with one difference i will explain below)
Manual Activation using the Import Feature
So, as a fact, AM’s assessement that there is no Internet Connection is wrong. This is why i wonder how AM is checking if there is a Internet Connection or not since I guess the check might lead to this misjudgement.
Now, as said, the PC is in the same LAN Segment as another PC where activation is working. Also when looking at the firewall i can see no outgoing traffic from the PC beeing blocked. Furthermore, when trying to activate on the PC in the tcpdump made during the activation button is pressed, i can see no outgoing request at all. So I’m wondering what AM actually is doing to determine if there is an internet connection - how can it know if it’s not even trying to reach something in the internet?
That leaves me with two ideas:
It’s using the Windows Network Indicator, which is known to not work properly in many circumstances
This PC is connected to a powerline adapter which is a part of the same phyical LAN as the other Computer which is working resides. Altough i haven’t seen any broadcasts in the tcpdump, i could imagine to detect if there is at least network connectivity AM is sending a icmp to the broadcast address in the LAN which might not return an answer because of the two powerline adapters usesd (i think i once read they do not route icmps correctly).
So again and bottomline: I’d like to learn how AM is determing if there is a internet connection or not and if there is a way to bypass this check?
Windows 10 ships with the curl command these days and it’s a much more reliable test whether the command is going to work in Steinberg Activation Manager as both curl and SAM use the underlying Windows SSL libraries and certificate stores, whereas most browsers have their own SSL stack and certificate management.
Of course, if the problem is with the network, that will be apparent in the browser too.
A brute force approach to clear the licensing data is to close Steinberg Activation Manager and wait for 10 seconds for the SteinbergLicenseEngine process to quit, then delete the contents of %APPDATA%\Steinberg\Activation Manager
The curl command is a much more reliable test whether the command is going to work in Steinberg Activation Manager as both curl and SAM use the underlying Windows SSL libraries and certificate stores, whereas most browsers have their own SSL stack and certificate management.
Hi AnalogGuy
Try physically swapping the network connections of the working PC with the not working PC and see if the problem stays with the network or follows the PC (trouble shooting 101)
Also some tight browsers eg Brave New Private window can block certain things
