Last week you installed and activated your Kofax VRS 4.x license and were merrily scanning your way through the week without issues. Today it says the license is already in use on another machine. You haven’t installed any patches or made any other changes to your machine or the scanner since the install. None of your co-workers deactivated your license so they could use it elsewhere. You may even have had Kofax reset the license once already and gone through the activation process again only to find yourself here once more. So, what gives?
During the activation process, VRS uses the machine’s MAC address to build the Machine ID that it assigns to the license. If the machine has multiple MAC addresses, VRS just picks the first one it sees. The MACs aren’t necessarily presented to the application in the same order every time so, every time you launch it, you run the risk of it finding a different MAC than the one it used to activate the license. If the two values don’t match, VRS thinks it isn’t your license. These days, most machines have multiple MAC addresses. Each Network Interface Controller has one of its own and VPN software is also known to add a MAC address to the registry. Luckily, there’s a fix. Kofax included a backup method to let VRS use the machine’s unique GUID to generate the Machine ID instead of using a MAC address. Here are the steps:
- In Windows XP, go to the Windows Control Panel and click on Network Connections. In Windows Vista, type “Network Connections” into the Start Menu’s search bar.
- Right-click on each connection and select Disable.
- Open Activate VRS in the Start Menu ¦ All Programs ¦ Kofax VRS program group.
- An error will appear stating that Activate cannot locate a network connection. Click Cancel.
- Another error message will appear; click OK.
- Once the Activate VRS screen appears, check the Machine ID field. This field should now be populated with a 32-digit sequence of characters. This is the computer’s GUID.
- Go back to the Network Connections and re-enable the network connection used to connect to the Internet.
- In the Activate utility, click Get License Code. A congratulations message should appear when the activation has completed successfully.
- Re-enable all network connections.
If you have VPN software installed on the machine, you will need to uninstall it before performing these steps. Once you have successfully activated the license, you can re-install the VPN software.
Kofax Resources: KB article 12706
