Many customers and partners are running on Apple's Macintosh OS X (Mac) these days. Unfortunately, when product license files are downloaded using Microsoft's Entourage or Outlook for Mac email clients, those products change the Line Breaks of the license file to Classic Mac (CR) which is not a readable format for the SWIFT licensing engine utilized by Cisco. This in turn prevents you from being able to successfully upload license files to your Cisco product. You'll be presented with an error message indicating the license files have been tampered with, or are invalid. You may see something similar to the following:
A license file or license directory was found to be invalid and will not be installed. Ignoring the license file: CXNxxxxxxx.lic. If you believe this file or directory should be valid, please contact support personnel
To resolve this problem you must use a Text Editor and change the Line Breaks and Encoding back to the original file format delivered by Cisco. You can download the free "TextWrangler" text editor via the Apple Mac App Store, or here: http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/. Below are instructions assuming you are using TextWrangler:
- In Entourage or Outlook for Mac, download the license and open it in TextWrangler
- At the bottom of the UI, change the parameters to Unicide (UTF-8) and Unix (LF) and save the file
- Upload the license file to your product
Related Defect:
NOTE: This does not affect users using Apple's Mail program as it does not change the Line Break or Encoding of the file only those using Microsoft's Entourage or Outlook for Mac.