Troubleshooting general licensing client connectivity

If your software is unable to communicate with SOLO Server, the user may be prompted with an error such as 9101 or 9105. This generally means the web service was unreachable, and this is usually a networking issue on your customer's end due to a firewall or proxy server that may be blocking communication with the server. Configuration changes to allow communication to the licensing server would fix the issue in this case.

Troubleshoot connection to SOLO Server

Start by having the user navigate to SOLO Server preferably using Internet Explorer (Windows 8.1 or earlier) or Edge (Windows 10 or later). Make sure the user has all browser tabs and windows closed, opens a fresh browser window, and then navigates to the following address:
- https://secure.softwarekey.com (or your server domain if using SOLO Server Dedicated URL or SOLO Server Self-Hosted)
If the user can reach SOLO Server, they should simply see the text "OK" in the web browser.
If they do NOT see the "OK" text, then something on their end is blocking the connection to SOLO Server. Our licensing clients all use the same underlying technology as web browsers for activation. This means only connections on ports 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS) need to be allowed. See Client activation ports and SOLO Server IP address for more details.

Activate Manually

If they can connect through the browser, but can't activate through your software, a potential temporary solution to get them activated would be to complete a manual activation process (if you've allowed this option in your software).

For Instant Protection PLUS 3, this would be the "Users may activate my application from another computer" option, which adds the "Activate From Another Computer" choice to the activation dialog.
For Protection PLUS 5 SDK, this would be the manual activation process for PLUSManaged or PLUSNative. There is also the ability to add support for Proxy servers (PLUSManaged and PLUSNative).

The user would actually be able to complete this on the same computer if they can access SOLO Server through a web browser. Note that if you require your software to periodically validate with SOLO Server, this validation attempt would fail if it is still unable to connect to SOLO Server automatically.