All Chowmain drivers stopped working - Please purchase license (driverCentral problem)

[jfh]

Apparently sometime after March 8th almost all of my Chowmain driver instances have stopped working with most having an Activation Status of “Please purchase license”.

Rebooting my controller did not help.

 

Any suggestions on how to recover @alanchow

[jfh]

Forcing driverCentral Cloud to check in seems to have fixed the problem.  I would have expected that to happen automatically on a controller reboot.

[South Africa C4 user]

Yeah - this seems to have been a driver central issue (has happened twice this year).  There is another thread on it fro, a week or so ago, but no response from Driver Central.  It is worrying because when drivers stop working everything dies.  In my case, the big issue was that our security system stopped working... what worries me is that if this happens at the wrong time, that could be a catastrophe... all our security panic buttons go through C4, so our security driver not working is not an option...

[jfh]

I also found that Advanced Announcements no longer works even after fixing the licensing problem.  Don’t know if the two are related.  But this is very disconcerting- the function of my system relies HEAVILY on Chowmain drivers and not realizing one or more isn’t functioning as expected is a big problem.

@alanchow is there someway we can get a Chowmain driver health check function with event(s) that will fire if any driver is unlicensed or returns an error?

[South Africa C4 user]

8 hours ago, jfh said:

I also found that Advanced Announcements no longer works even after fixing the licensing problem.  Don’t know if the two are related.  But this is very disconcerting- the function of my system relies HEAVILY on Chowmain drivers and not realizing one or more isn’t functioning as expected is a big problem.

@alanchow is there someway we can get a Chowmain driver health check function with event(s) that will fire if any driver is unlicensed or returns an error?

Nice idea!

[blub]

I am also not a fan of the "check license every x days model" as one of our systems sometimes is offline for weeks and I am not sure if the system will work then - until now we were never at the house when that happened.

Personally I would like a license system that keeps working 3 months until the next check in as long as the MAC hasn't changed.
I am pretty sure that would not be to any disadvantage for the driver manufacturer or DriverCentral

[jfh]

1 hour ago, blub said:

Personally I would like a license system that keeps working 3 months until the next check in as long as the MAC hasn't changed.
I am pretty sure that would not be to any disadvantage for the driver manufacturer or DriverCentral

 

Also a good idea though I would prefer local keys/certificates stored on the controller to validate the licenses rather than having to check with an external server at all.  Aren’t most licenses lifetime and/or tied to a MAC anyway?

I really didn’t think about driverCentral bing a single point of failure until this happened.

[blub]

Yeah most licensed are lifetime linked to the controller.

However I don't think DC will change the whole licensing model to store the certs on the Controller.
However a function to keeps licenses active for up to 90 days after the last checkin should be easy to implement - maybe we should send DC an email.
If they get enough feedback there is a fair chance, especially if one considers security equipment and heating - both can have catastrophic effects if not functional

[jfh]

I agree DC probably isn’t going to change the whole model and your suggestion is more practical.  I wa mostly questioning the current logic.

 

Perhaps it’s DC that we need to petition to implement my “fire an event if something is wrong” suggestion.  I’m going to suggest both that and the 90 day check in to them and hope others will do the same.  @DriverCentral can you comment?

[South Africa C4 user]

@DriverCentral - the above sounds like a really good idea... the 2 downtime’s (that I am aware of) have caused chaos in my project (and also in other projects - per my dealer).

@DriverCentral - I assume that you are aware that certain drivers (e.g. the Domosapiens DSC Security Driver) were not able to handle the rejoining a project the first time this service went down (January) and that this broke a lot of systems with this driver (including mine) and resultsed in hours of work (and dealer fees).  I realize that Domosapiens released an update a month or so later which meant that the second time (that I am aware of) the serviice went down, we did not lose everything again but simply had to restart the Driver Central cloud monitorIng...

All in all, not cool and @DriverCentral you really need to do something different.

[msgreenf]

I recommend contacting driver central directly and not counting on this message board to make your point

Sent from my BBF100-2 using Tapatalk

[jfh]

22 minutes ago, msgreenf said:

I recommend contacting driver central directly and not counting on this message board to make your point
 

I’m going to be contacting them directly.  But by also posting here I hope to raise awareness in a way just opening a support ticket doesn’t.  

This seems to be a DC problem.  But it should concern every developer who uses the service because most people are going to blame the driver and not DC (look at this thread - my first instinct was to fault Chowmain)j

[South Africa C4 user]

19 minutes ago, msgreenf said:

I recommend contacting driver central directly and not counting on this message board to make your point

Sent from my BBF100-2 using Tapatalk
 

Agreed... doing both! 

[DriverCentral]

Hey guys, 

We are aware of the issues that have been described here.

One the issues was due to improper implementation of the our cloud driver on the developers side. This was fixed after we discovered what was causing this.

We see some mentions about drivers not reactivating properly in a slightly different fashion lately. It appears to be with Chowmains drivers. We are investigating this,  and will have a fix this week. It could be his drivers, or it could be us. But either way, we will get a fix out as quickly as possible.

Now in regards to the recent server outage, I see some concerns about DC being a single point of failure. This outage shouldn’t have worked the way it did, the licenses should have continued as normal in this situation. But we fixed the issue pretty quickly. And are still making improvements over the next week. The drivers we’re back online within 1.5 hours.

We’re really sorry for any inconvenience it caused anyone. And we really try our hardest to make the experience as seamless as possible for customers, and dealers. All of the developers that sell drivers on the site are extremely busy most of the time. And when we identify issues we all work together to get it fixed as quickly as possible, albeit occasional delays due to life and busy schedules.

Thanks

 

 

 

[Gary Leeds UK]

2 hours ago, msgreenf said:

I recommend contacting driver central directly and not counting on this message board to make your point

Sent from my BBF100-2 using Tapatalk
 

Why not post on the Forum ? 

[Gary Leeds UK]

1 hour ago, DriverCentral said:

Hey guys, 

We are aware of the issues that have been described here.

One the issues was due to improper implementation of the our cloud driver on the developers side. This was fixed after we discovered what was causing this.

We see some mentions about drivers not reactivating properly in a slightly different fashion lately. It appears to be with Chowmains drivers. We are investigating this,  and will have a fix this week. It could be his drivers, or it could be us. But either way, we will get a fix out as quickly as possible.

Now in regards to the recent server outage, I see some concerns about DC being a single point of failure. This outage shouldn’t have worked the way it did, the licenses should have continued as normal in this situation. But we fixed the issue pretty quickly. And are still making improvements over the next week. The drivers we’re back online within 1.5 hours.

We’re really sorry for any inconvenience it caused anyone. And we really try our hardest to make the experience as seamless as possible for customers, and dealers. All of the developers that sell drivers on the site are extremely busy most of the time. And when we identify issues we all work together to get it fixed as quickly as possible, albeit occasional delays due to life and busy schedules.

Thanks

 

 

 

Thank you for the Update

[jfh]

2 hours ago, DriverCentral said:

Hey guys, 

We are aware of the issues that have been described here.

One the issues was due to improper implementation of the our cloud driver on the developers side. This was fixed after we discovered what was causing this.

We see some mentions about drivers not reactivating properly in a slightly different fashion lately. It appears to be with Chowmains drivers. We are investigating this,  and will have a fix this week. It could be his drivers, or it could be us. But either way, we will get a fix out as quickly as possible.

Now in regards to the recent server outage, I see some concerns about DC being a single point of failure. This outage shouldn’t have worked the way it did, the licenses should have continued as normal in this situation. But we fixed the issue pretty quickly. And are still making improvements over the next week. The drivers we’re back online within 1.5 hours.

We’re really sorry for any inconvenience it caused anyone. And we really try our hardest to make the experience as seamless as possible for customers, and dealers. All of the developers that sell drivers on the site are extremely busy most of the time. And when we identify issues we all work together to get it fixed as quickly as possible, albeit occasional delays due to life and busy schedules.

Thanks

 

 

 

Thanks for the update.  Will you let us know which, if any, drivers need to be updated after you figure out the fix whether it be yours or any individual third party driver?

[msgreenf]

6 hours ago, Gary Leeds UK said:

Why not post on the Forum ? 

I wasn't saying don't post - I am just saying that contacting support directly is the best option.

[alanchow]

driverCentral is looking into this for us.  As a large quantity of driverCentral drivers are ours (we have 95 drivers on driverCentral vs a total of 220 on the market) it is highly likely that if you are using a driverCentral driver you are using one of ours hence the confusion.

When Kyle mentioned "One the issues was due to improper implementation of the our cloud driver on the developers side. This was fixed after we discovered what was causing this."  This was in reference to a domosapiens driver in which case Paul found the problem and fixed all of his drivers.  To date our implementation of the driverCentral licencing code is per driverCentral's instructions.

If however any fault is found at our end we will resolve the issue as we have always done with any fault discovered.