6 days ago • 99%

Oopsie, Visual Studio License expired, so the build server stopped working

Oh no, not just my build server, Microsofts build server... Everyones' Azure build server - (if you're building on windows)

91 comments

Imagine your compiler performing a license check.

244
- It's not using just the compiler. This agent is configured to use the full version of Visual Studio for some reason, and building through that, which requires a license. You can build via the msbuild system, which doesn't require a license.
  
  37
  
  It gets worse if you use Microsoft D365 AX products. Then you have to provision an entire Build server for builds which has to run Visual Studio 2019 on Windows 10. To do a build you run a pipeline in Azure DevOps, which runs the compiler in a full Visual Studio 2019 environment, which has to run on a special Azure virtual environment running Windows 10 hosted by Microsoft. It's so fragile.
  
  2
  
  It gets worse if you use Microsoft D365 AX products. Then you have to provision an entire Build server for builds which has to run Visual Studio 2019 on Windows 10. To do a build you run a pipeline in Azure DevOps, which runs the compiler in a full Visual Studio 2019 environment, which has to run on a special Azure virtual environment running Windows 10 hosted by Microsoft. It's so fragile.
  
  1
- There are companies selling a relabeled GCC with the O flags behind the license check.
  
  13
- pretty sure it's been a thing since even before free compilers
  
  -3
  
  People forget that compilers used to be commonly proprietary and commercially licensed. Heck, I'm born on the 90s and knew that 😂
  
  So so glad free and open source software took over though
  
  21
Like ransom ware

87
- Oh God I HAVE TO PAY? LITERALLY SLAVERY
  
  -64
  
  👢👅👅👅
  
  42
  
  How about, I don't know, not yanking the cord (or setting things up so the cord is yanked automatically) and pursuing the payment later?
  
  But then that could mean that someone might - even temporarily - get something for nothing, and they can't be seen to promote anything even remotely similar to that.
  
  Perhaps this tiny company are so close to the knife edge that they can't afford to allow it to happen. Must have constant revenue stream or else close up sho... wait, Micro-who?
  
  25
  
  Imagine paying money for software designed to sabotage your business if you miss a license payment.
  
  21
I swear to the gods, proprietary software is going to be the end of civilization...

49
Why are text editors cloud services now?

49
- So they can charge subscriptions
  
  45
- I use vim btw
  
  14
  
  Peak editing with vim/neovim
  
  2
- IDEs have had subscriptions for ages. The build server is a cloud service because local machines can be slow to compile and not everyone has an on-site build server.
  
  3
As a sysadmin, fuck certificates. They are the bane of my existence. I vote we abolish certs and go Irish honor system!

51
- How is the Irish honor system different than a regular honor system?
  
  19
  
  39
  
  The potatoes?
  
  2
- certificates fucking destroy everything in my work for an hour once every year because of expiry
  
  15
  
  You are supposed to be tracking when they expire and then renew/replace them before they expire.
  
  22
  
  Certs have existed a long time, are never implemented correctly, and the expiration cycle that is supposed to bolster security just causes pain as a result.
  
  Certs should just be redesigned to have a kill switch. CRLs were supposed to handle that, but are rarely implemented or implemented correctly.
  
  Certs are also used in so many places where they may not be suited to the task, but because they exist, they've become the de-facto standard.
  
  A temporal expiration system seems flawed from the beginning anyway. What, you don't trust your system anymore just because time has passed? Time is always passing. Are we all secretly racist against clocks now?
  
  12
- Are you talking licenses or certificates? Because if certificates are not automated that's not a problem with certificates but with administration.
  
  4
Absolutely proprietary

60
I can't believe it's real. 🤦‍♂️

https://status.dev.azure.com/_event/543117809

44
Microsoft Hosted Agents have an expired Visual Studio license.

Is it like, Microsoft has to renew licence with Microsoft?

Or are they pushing for an upgrade?

41
- i imagine MS just hard coded a random license key into the build image and it expired. the issue doesn't say exactly tho
  
  2
I don't get the appeal of azure because of things like this.

annoying how much they try to push it

38
- Moving to the cloud is a business decision not a technical one.
  
  Csuite sees us spending Capex 200K on a server or 2 and several thousand opex per year to maintain it.
  
  Cloud takes that 200K Capex and move it to Opex with significant markup markup.
  
  From a technical pov we st it as a waste but business will business itself into cost overruns
  
  31
  
  But they promised we could save a ton of money with their monitoring dashboards we won't look at until suddenly we get a bill that is 5x what they promised!
  
  21
- The company I work for loves Azure. If it's not available as an Azure service it won't be used (except for uptime kuma). Some time ago there was a global Azure outage and we could do literally nothing. All tasks and code were on Azure Devops and all communication went through Teams and Outlook.
  
  The webhook integration has also recently been removed from Teams so uptime kuma also didn't work for like a week until it was fixed by using Azure's automation service.
  
  27
  
  If it's not available as an Azure service it won't be used (except for uptime kuma).
  
  What Clive Barker movie do you live in?
  
  3
- Azure is absolute trash. Its like Word but for the cloud.
  
  20
  
  I mean, they do have word for the cloud now.. But I get what you're saying
  
  18
- Walled garden or die
  
  Thats how i read azure
  
  15
- If you look at it as generic could provider it's not good, but if you look at it as making m$ run they're software instead of you it's awesome because most m$ software is not fun to run
  
  7
- I personally prefer Azure over AWS.
  
  4
Isn’t that an IDE? Why would a build server need that? Sigh.

23
- For using msbuild or vsbuild to build C projects.
  
  Can be installed standalone but it's typically just easier to install the full VS suite because on a shared runner it's better to include the entire kitchen.
  
  21
  
  For C, I use Makefiles. The Microsoft ecosystem sounds like a nightmare.
  
  12
- Fron what I gather, visual studio is a horrible monolith that also contains C/C++/C++++ build stuff.
  
  1
If I have a nickel for everytime someone said "The cloud never goes down".

I'd have a lot of nickels and would spend my time doing something I like a lot more than working 🤑.

2
I'm not familiar with the service, can someone explain? Like, are all pipelines on Azure affected? Or is it some internal stuff where a company relying on paid tech forgot to pay for it?

14
- No, not some internal company, just Microsoft being Microsoft. So all Windows pipelines. They also have Linux based pipelines so not completely all pipelines.
  
  But given that a lot of people build dotnet stuff on Azure, the 'windows-latest' image is usually the default. So a lot of pipelines
  
  10
  
  Wow, that's big. Thank you for the clarification.
  
  2
- I think they forgot to pay themselves to use their product.
  
  10
I am not sure if Martin would appreciate his name this clear on the lemmyverse.

11
- Yea, too many people won't realize that they are just the on-call person fixing it.
  
  2
~~I didn't even know VS Code was something you could pay for.~~

~~Also, are you using Discord bots for work?~~

Edit: Nope and nope.

7
- As is tradition with MS and their complicated naming policies Visual Studio is not VS Code.
  
  70
  
  Also, VS Code is mid, not even working correctly and definitely not OOB on Linux in my experience, and VS just does not support Linux at all. And is shit anyway.
  
  12
- Visual Studio and VS Code are two separate products, I'm afraid. Visual Studio is a .NET IDE and build tool, as opposed to VS Code which is essentially an extensible text editor.
  
  Edit: also the screenshot looks like it might be from Slack?
  
  27
  
  The great thing about Slack is how easy it is to make automations. I guess this one just reads RSS feeds.
  
  At my work we have automations notifying us about production errors for example.
  
  4
- That's not a Discord bot, it's a Slack RSS App / RSS subscription.
  
  Event Source: https://status.dev.azure.com/_event/543117809
  
  It's pretty useful 'for work' because occasionally you'll get notifications when parts of infra might be down (like your build server)
  
  15
I mean yeah, if our gitlab license expires, it won't build artifacts for us any more, either. I think, we haven't let it lapse yet.

Mind you this usually comes at the end of quite a lot of warnings that your license is about to expire, I think Azura starts at 3 months out unless you either turn the mails off or filter them.

1
Next Up
Windows Server license on MS Windows Activation server has expired...

0
It's like none of you have experienced an outage before

-9
- Something something Eggs, something something baskets...
  
  7
  
  🤷‍♂️ run your own 4 nines service to complete. Nothing is preventing you. People choose this shit because running services is hard and expensive.
  
  -1

You've viewed 91 comments.