Activation server is down, Design Premium blames me!

[rohan_creativelifeform]

This is pretty funny, so for some reason today I get an activation request from Photoshop CS5.1 eventhough I've used the product many times already, and have activated it. Yet today I opened it up and it told me activation has failed because I was not connected to the Internet. Lo and behold I am here posting this right now. So I see that Photoshop is trying to connect to https://activate.adobe.com/ which is down for me. So actually it's not my fault the product cannot activate, but something to do with Adobe's server obviously. It's pretty frustrating to be told I have 23 days left or my product will be disabled blah blah when it's not even my own fault that this is occurring.

Doesn't Adobe have some kind of system in place to cope with their server having issues in this instance?

[NZReb]

Hi Rohan

I've been dealing with suddenly-appearing activation problems with FrameMaker about not being connected to the Internet. Wireshark showed FM wasn't even trying to contact the server. Grrrr. I've found a workaround: leave the PC turned on for several hours doing nothing, then reboot it, then open the program. If the workaround's worked, it'll open. Then close it and open it again. This time it should be fully activated, ie the deactivate option appears in the Help menu.

I'd be interested to know if this works for you!

If anyone from Adobe's reading, I've got an Adobe support case - 182668709.

Cheers

Rebecca

[rohan_creativelifeform]

Nope didn't work. The problem is that the server which handles the activation process is down. So it's an Adobe problem.

[NZReb]

Hi Rohan

You may be right but are you sure? When we started striking problems a week ago, my first thought was that the server was down, but it didn't seem to be - I eventually worked out that Illustrator could access it ok but FM wouldn't.

When you try to ping activate.adobe.com, does it return an IP address [192.150.16.69]? If so, I think the server's reachable, just not replying to pings. The knowledgebase http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/100/1008779.html says "If the test is successful, the string activate.adobe.com [ip address] is returned (You can ignore the other information returned.)" I think that means they've configured the server to not reply to pings and as long as you see the IP address, your contact with the server is ok.

Have a look at the activation log. It's somewhere in Documents and Settings and is called amt3.log (sorry, I can't remember the path and I'm not on a work PC atm). Try another program in the CS suite and see if that manages to open ok. If so, the log will show it accessing the activation server. Or anyway, this is what it did for us.

Cheers

Rebecca