Online Licensing Issue

[GLASS-CANVAS]

Hi There,

My company switched over from dongle licenses spread around our two offices and various servers last week, and I have to say the process was unexpectedly painless! So well done to all those involved in coding the license switching system.
However, this morning something unexpected happened; for about 5 minutes in my office we were without internet, and during that time no-one could render. On top of that we had 3DS Max crash out on our users when they hit render. When the internet came back on a few minutes later everything worked again.
So my question is: Does the online Licensing system have absolutely no grace period to cover for small outages? If not, this could be a real problem, as internet can go down without any warning. Personally, I would expect at least a 24 hour period where you can carry on rendering. Without this we are at the mercy of our ISP, and this could seriously damage our buisness.

Best regards,

Bill

[ivan.slavchev]

You can borrow your licenses on the license server machine and set them to auto-renew. That way you'll be able to use the licenses for 2 weeks without Internet at a time - https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...or+Offline+Use

That can be a problem, however, if you use more than 1 license server machine, since borrowing the licenses will reserve them on the particular license server and only it will be able to redistribute them In that case - if the servers are in one network (or at least - in mutually reachable networks) with the render nodes = you can borrow half licenses on each server and set both servers in the machines' license settings - https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...cense+Settings

[GLASS-CANVAS]

Hi Ivan,
Thank you for the reply. For the future would Chaos Group consider adding resilience to the licensing system? The borrowing method seems quite unsatisfactory for reasons that yourself and the borrowing page make note of. What we really need is an automatic fall-back should the connection between us and Chaos be broken. Right now, the system has 2 obvious points of failure; either a loss of connectivity at our end, or one at your end. Furthermore, either of us could be hit by a DDOS attack, it does happen from time to time, as do unexpected power cuts, server crashes etc.
Without an automatic fall-back any service interruption could potentially ruin overnight or over-the-weekend rendering, something we depend on to keep our business running.

Best regards,

Bill

[ivaylocg]

Ongoing rendering will not be affected by losing connection to the license server, the problem will be only with initiating a new render during the time of that outage. In that case, the offline licensing option should be used. There is a procedure that allows borrowing licenses without internet connection, which is described in the documentation and is mean to be used in such cases.