This guide is for the person who deployed the Enclave appliance. Licence
activation is done in the appliance web UI at
/license — no console
access is required.How appliance licensing works
The appliance is licensed with a signed licence file that Kvelden issues for your organisation. The licence is cryptographically signed; the appliance verifies it against a trust anchor built into the image, so it cannot be forged or altered. No connection to Kvelden is required to activate — the appliance validates the licence entirely offline. Appliances are licensed at the Enterprise‑Advanced tier. Commercial terms (number of seats, licence duration, support level) are encoded in the licence your account team issues; every appliance feature is included.Upload and activate a licence
1
Obtain the licence file
Your Kvelden account team issues a licence file (
.json) scoped to your
organisation. It contains the validity dates, seat count, and tier — and a
signature. Keep the file; you will upload it as‑is.2
Open the licence page
Sign in to the appliance as the administrator and go to
/license
(for example https://vault.yourcompany.com/license).3
Upload the licence
Select the licence file and click Activate. The appliance verifies the
signature, confirms the licence is within its validity window, and activates
it. On success the licence details (tier, seats, expiry) are shown.
4
Confirm
The trial banner is replaced by your licence details. Feature access and the
seat limit now reflect the licence.
Keep the appliance clock accurate. Licence activation checks the licence’s
validity dates against the appliance’s own clock. If the appliance clock is
wrong — commonly after a VM is suspended, or on a network that blocks public
NTP — activation can fail with “License is not active yet” or
“License has expired” even though the licence is valid.Before uploading, confirm the clock on the appliance console with
time show.
If it is off, correct it with time ntp <your-ntp-server> (for example your
internal domain controller) or, on an isolated network, set it manually with
time set <YYYY-MM-DD> <HH:MM:SS> in UTC. See
Time & clock synchronisation.Licences are issued with a short grace on their start date to absorb minor
clock differences, so an accurate appliance clock always activates a
freshly‑issued licence.Renewing before expiry
To extend or resize your deployment, request a new licence from your account team and upload it at/license the same way. The new licence takes effect
immediately; there is no downtime and no reinstallation.
We recommend renewing a few days before expiry. If a licence does lapse, the
appliance remains available in read‑only mode and uploading a new licence
restores full function immediately — no data is lost.
Troubleshooting
The appliance never contacts Kvelden to validate a licence, and it never
hard‑locks your data. Even an expired licence leaves every file readable and
downloadable.