Skip to content

Too Many Active Anchors

URI: https://docs.ankatech.co/errors/too-many-active-anchors
HTTP Status: 409 Conflict

When you see this

Committing the selected certificates would push the number of ACTIVE TSA trust anchors past the configured maximum of 5. The cap exists to bound the single Redis projection envelope that core-api reads, so an unbounded ACTIVE set cannot produce an oversized envelope. The upload is rolled back in full — no anchor from the submission is persisted.

Common Causes

  • Five anchors are already ACTIVE and another upload was attempted.
  • A multi-fingerprint selection would fit individually but not collectively — the check is against the total after the commit, not the count you are adding.
  • Two uploads committed concurrently: the count is re-asserted inside the transaction after the inserts, so the later one is rolled back even though its initial check passed.

Response Example

{
  "type": "https://docs.ankatech.co/errors/too-many-active-anchors",
  "title": "Conflict",
  "status": 409,
  "detail": "The maximum number of active trust anchors (5) has been reached. Retire an existing anchor before adding another.",
  "instance": "/api/v3/admin/platform/tsa/trust-anchors",
  "timestamp": 1730000000,
  "extensions": {
    "requestId": "550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000"
  }
}

Content-Type: application/problem+json — the response follows RFC 9457 Problem Details.

How to Resolve

  1. List the current anchors with GET /api/v3/admin/platform/tsa/trust-anchors and identify which are ACTIVE.
  2. Retire an anchor you no longer need with POST /api/v3/admin/platform/tsa/trust-anchors/{id}/retire, then retry the upload.
  3. If you are mid-rotation, retire the outgoing CA once the incoming one is ACTIVE — several ACTIVE anchors are allowed precisely to support a rotation overlap.
  4. If the failure came from a concurrent upload, re-check the list and retry once; the transaction was rolled back, so nothing partial was left behind.

For full schema definitions, examples, and interactive testing, see the Developer Hub Reference.