Today, I received a Virtual PC image that was customized by a partner for their add-on. (Everyone knows the Contoso images).
Next to the fact it took quite some time to load, I was unable to run NAV in it.
As soon as i clicked the shortcut, a nice pop-up came saying the license was expired…
Easy enough to solve, I hear some of you thinking. But this pop-up came before the application itself was loaded, so i could not import the license file.
Since I like to play around fiddling with stuff, i started looking at the origin of the problem:
– Delete zup file had no effect
– There was no fin.flf in the program files folder
Next thing I thought of was to look into the SQL Server $ndo$dbproperty table. But the license was stored on server level. So I went to the master database and took table $ndo$srvproperty which had the license in a binary field. Apparently, you cannot empty this field, so i deleted the record. But i was still unable to launch the executable (even directly from the program files folder).
Suddenly I noticed that cronus.flf was written in captions, which normally isn’t so… And yes, the partner updated the cronus.flf with their own license which was expired.
After deleting this file, the application started up, trying to install missing components (cronus.flf). Since the install files were not on the server, this failed and the application still wasn’t open. So I copied the cronus.flf from the “Application Server” folder, which was not updated and i was good to go. (Or so I thought).
I had deleted my zup file and had to manually connect to the server/database. Now I received following notice:
“The database on the server does not contain Microsoft Dynamics NAV system objects and cannot be opened.”
Installing a new database on the server did not work either. So I finally ended up with restoring a copy of the virtual image and waiting another hour till it was rebooted.
I hope someone can benefit from this information. And as a reminder or for other people who didn’t read completely:
TL;DR [1]
– Do not replace the cronus.flf with another license, create a fin.flf in the application folder for this purpose.
– Do not drop the records in $ndo$srvproperty (master database) or in $ndo$dbproperty (NAV database)
As a last note, on the Contoso images of Microsoft, you can use the Contoso domain administrator with password: pass@word1
This could maybe save you some lookup time.
The keyboard is set up default to en-US, so maybe try in the username field to see if you have it right.
