Recently (starting some time after the first of the year), we’ve started having users call and tell us that their formerly working install of Adobe Photoshop CS6 was now asking for a sign-in:
We could not figure out why this was happening. An uninstall and reinstall of our AAMEE3-generated installation package seemed to get things working. But then the same users would call back the next day with the same issue.
Searching for “is required within 32767 days otherwise it will stop working” brought up a few people with similar issues, but no clear resolution.
I posed the question to some of the folk who hang out on the #osx-server Freenode IRC channel. Sam Keeley had encountered the exact same problem and had a fix.
The problem apparently occurs with CS6 products that have been packaged for distribution using the Adobe Application Manager, Enterprise Edition version 3.0 tool (AAMEE 3.0) that was released shortly after CS6 shipped.
Sam told me Adobe was aware of this problem, and that even though I was seeing it only on a few machines right now, eventually it would spread to all machines that had this CS6 product installed. The fix was to use AAMEE 3.1 to generate a “serialization executable” that can be used to re-serialize in-place installs of CS6 products.
I assume (though have not tested) that an alternative fix would be to create a new installer package using AAMEE 3.1, remove the “broken” CS6 product installed with an AAMEE 3.0 package, then reinstall using the updated installation package.
It’s great that the cause has been identified and a fix is available. But I am a little annoyed that if Adobe knew of this issue, I can’t find any evidence that they tried to communicate it to enterprise administrators.
It would have been nice to have had a heads-up about this issue so I could have addressed it proactively, rather than scrambling to fix it after our users started calling.
Thanks to Sam Keeley for his assistance on this issue.
