How to remove a client from a perforce server that does not start

Question

I finally got to upgrade my perforce server to 2014.

I had a single administrator user license, but I did not pay an annual update, because although the new free license will suit me - 20 clients. I just deleted the old license file.

I did not know that I had 29 clients.

I get this error message

C:\Program Files\Perforce\NewServer>p4d Perforce server error: Unlicensed server cannot start while over user/client quota. Try deleting old clients with 'client -d'. License count: 29 clients used of 20 licensed. 

Can I select 29 clients to remove? obviously, the p4 client command will not connect because the server is down. Can I run this command against p4d or something like that?

On Monday, I will contact the support team, but I wonder if there is anything that I could do myself.

Answer 1

I don’t know if there is a solution to what I wanted to do, but that’s how I decided it.

Before upgrading, I made a full backup of my perforce directory.

• Unzip backup
• Open 'cmd' in the backup directory
• start p4d from the command line by starting the perforce server
• connection to a regular p4v client
• Delete all additional customers
• Close the p4d window to kill the perforce instance.
• Create breakpoint
• Delete db. * files from a real folder
• Restore a newly created breakpoint in a real folder.

Now everything works.

Answer 2

We just suffered from it. As a result, we released

 "p4d -n -p 1666" 

which put us in service mode. Then we could remove customer specifications. After removing a few, we could start the server again.