tried to upgrade to BE getting invalid key -license starts with a 3 locked out of portainer

[fiver22]

Ask a Question!

I thought I'd try upgrading to BE

I signed up for the 3 nodes via website, hit upgrade to BE (or similar) via my Portainer instance and it gave a brief failure message.
Now when I try to login to my Portainer instance it redirects me to asking for a license key
"Please register your Portainer license.
Your license key should start with “2-”.
License: "
When I submit the License I get 'Failure license is invalid"

My key starts with a 3 but the prompt says it should start with a 2.

I'm not sure what to do at this point so any help would be appreciated.

edits: typos, clarifications

[fiver22]

I ended up rolling back as per https://portal.portainer.io/knowledge/can-i-downgrade-from-portainer-business-to-portainer-ce
I'm pretty sure I could have approached this more carefully and avoided the issue; so that's on me.

Upon losing access to my instance I replied to the "Welcome" email with a short description of what happened and was told 'For our 3 or 5 nodes free users, we offer Community Support only so please post your question in our Portainer on Github channel' -Which is fair for a free product.

Still, heart skipped a beat or two. Stupid as I may have been, I tried this on my own stuff and not at the office, at least.

[jamescarppe]

The 3 Nodes Free license keys require that the user be running version 2.18.4 or newer of Portainer in order to proceed. Older versions of Portainer will only accept the older license keys. We note this on the sign up page for 3 Nodes Free as well as in the welcome emails themselves.

[fiver22]

Yes, well, I can be a special kind of dummy; I didn't mean to suggest it wasn't my own fault.