Preparing for Change in SoftNAS License Manager IP Address

SoftNAS instances perform regular licensing checks in order to validate an installed license on the instance. These validation requests require making outbound HTTPS requests from the SoftNAS system to a license management server provided and managed by our licensing vendor, Nalpeiron (https://www.nalpeiron.com/).

This licensing service was introduced in SoftNAS release 5.4.0 and is included in all subsequent versions.

In the last week of November 2023, the licensing server (my.nalpeiron.com) was moved to a different hosting platform, and accordingly has a different IP address from the previous one. This IP address change was completed as of Saturday, Nov. 25, 2023.

There are two ways in which the IP address change may affect a SoftNAS deployment:

1. In some deployments, outbound requests from the SoftNAS system to the public Internet may be restricted by a network firewall, or by an equivalent on cloud hosting platforms: AWS security groups and/or network ACLs, and Azure network security groups. Not all deployments restrict outbound requests. If you have made a specific rule to accommodate outbound requests to the former licensing server IP address, the new IP address will likewise need to be allowed.

2. In some deployments, DNS lookups on the SoftNAS system for hosts on the public Internet are not supported in the environment. In this case, the SoftNAS system may have a hard-coded IP address for the licensing server, and this address will need to be changed.

Your particular environment may require one or both of these to be addressed. This will require accessing the command line on the SoftNAS system by connecting to the server via an SSH client, or by using a VM console or cloud platform console.

For any needed assistance with the steps outlined below, please open a support ticket by sending email to support@buurst.com.

In order to address the upcoming move of the licensing server, the following steps may be completed whenever convenient:

1. Determine whether you have working DNS resolution on your SoftNAS system that will translate the hostname my.nalpeiron.com to an IP address.

2. In consultation with your cloud platform and/or networking teams, determine whether there are rules that restrict outbound requests from the SoftNAS system to the public Internet, or specifically, to the previous and current addresses for the licensing server.

The new licensing server IP address is live as of Nov. 25, 2023.

The former IP address for my.nalpeiron.com was: 184.106.60.185

The current IP address for my.nalpeiron.com after the change is now: 20.237.110.18

Checking DNS resolution

First, examine your /etc/resolv.conf file for the nameservers listed there.

(Default as distributed with SoftNAS for recent releases):

(Example where you have added your own nameserver entries as used in your environment):

If the nameserver entries in /etc/resolv.conf include 127.0.0.1 (localhost), skip this entry; for other nameserver entries, do the following:

If each nslookup command returns output similar to that shown above, you have working DNS resolution for the nalpeiron.com domain in your SoftNAS environment.

On the other hand,

or:

If your nslookup test commands return errors similar to these, you do not have working DNS resolution for this domain in your SoftNAS environment.

Now, examine your /etc/hosts file as shown:

• If each of the nslookup commands as above showed that you have working DNS resolution, you may edit your /etc/hosts file and comment out (or remove) the entry for my.nalpeiron.com as shown (using your preferred text editor such as vi or nano). You will need to become root or use sudo in order to save changes to this file:

This will ensure that DNS will be used to resolve my.nalpeiron.com and you will not need to make further changes at the time of the IP address change.

• If the nslookup tests above showed that you do not have working DNS resolution, you will need to leave that line uncommented, but substitute the new IP address. The IP address change was implemented by Nalpeiron as of Saturday, Nov. 25, 2023. As of Feb. 28, 2024, the former IP address is no longer available.

Only in the case where working DNS resolution is not available on your SoftNAS system, the /etc/hosts file should be modified as follows:

Checking if firewall, security groups, or network ACLs blocking outbound requests

The following steps will be used to check whether outbound requests from your SoftNAS system to the new licensing server IP address are being blocked:

If the above command returns the source code of a web page as shown here, this request is not being blocked in your environment:

On the other hand, if the request is being blocked, you may receive errors such as the following:

If you encounter these or other errors with this test command, it means that outbound requests from the SoftNAS system to the new licensing server IP address are being blocked in your environment. Please update any firewall rules, security group rules, or network ACLs as needed in order to permit outbound traffic on TCP port 443, from SoftNAS to the new licensing server IP, 20.237.110.18, consulting with your cloud services and/or network security teams as needed. Allowing connections to specific addresses where restrictions would otherwise block those connections is commonly called “whitelisting”. If you already had rules allowing the previous licensing server IP, 184.106.60.185, these rules are no longer required after Saturday, Nov. 25, 2023.

On or after the IP address change date, Nov. 25, 2023:

• If you have verified working DNS for my.nalpeiron.com as shown above, ensure that the entry in /etc/hosts is commented out or removed:

• If you do not have working DNS for this domain in your SoftNAS environment, replace the my.nalpeiron.com address with the new one in /etc/hosts:

• Repeat the test as shown in the previous section to verify that you can connect to the licensing server on the new IP:

If this curl command returns errors, check the outbound rules again for the new IP address, 20.237.110.18.