Error message: The user xyz appears as an inactive user because his/her license has been deactivated. Please, activate it and then try again

Problem

The error "The user xyz appears as an inactive user because his/her license has been deactivated. Please, activate it and then try again" is raised while starting or operating a Plastic SCM client.

Reason

The current user is known to the system (i.e. the credentials are correct) but he or she is not licensed.

Solution

As a Plastic administrator, run the following command:

cm au <username>

You will need to have free licenses to assign.

More details

Plastic SCM uses named licenses, meaning that a user needs to have a license assigned to work with the system. Licenses are automatically assigned to users as soon as they perform a writing operation on the system. For instance, creating new revisions, branches, and/or attributes are all writing operations.

But Plastic SCM can also handle users that don't hold a license. This is useful in situations where an employee leaves the company and his or her license is assigned to a new employee. Plastic will keep track of the changes made by the original user separated from those of the new. In this case, the old user is deactivated, so his or her license is freed to be used by others.

This can also happen after an import from another version control system is performed. The users in the old repository will be imported into Plastic in the order they are found, so they consume licenses in the same order that they originally performed operations there. Normally this means that old users will be imported first, since they were performing operations when the repository history started. When the Plastic server has assigned all available licenses, the importer tool will add newer users as deactivated. If this happens, you'll want to deactivate old users and activate the required ones.

New users will get the "inactive user" error message when the maximum number of users allowed by the license file is reached.

There are several commands that help manage licensed users:

cm lu

Lists users and groups known by the Plastic SCM server. This is the list of all users that ever wrote in the system, independent of the licenses they are consuming.

cm li

License info. Displays the list of users actively consuming licenses, as well as those deactivated (not consuming licenses anymore).

cm au

Activates a previously deactivated user. The user will consume one license.

cm du

Deactivates a previously activated licensed user. The used license will be free to be used by other users.

Note: Only a Plastic administrator can run the commands above. Make sure that you have set up a Plastic server administrator user or group. The administrator of the Plastic server is the owner of the repository server. It can be a single user or a group.

If the administrator has not been set yet, you can use the GUI or the command line to do it. This command will set the owner of the repository server at myserver:8084 to the user miller:

cm sto -user=miller repserver:myserver:8084