Please simplify the licensing system - offline licenses permanently

[ramy02]

Just looking at all the threads here it’s clear that so many customers are having license issues. Our studio has them from time to time as well and while we’re able to troubleshoot, it takes up alot of time. I think re-evaluating the overall license system is worth the time.

A welcome addition would be offline licenses that do not expire and go back online. At minimum it should last a year, not 2 weeks. By the time we forget to renew, we always have an internet outage, and our artists cannot work, nor can we (easily, because it is doable) grab our licenses without an internet connection.

I’m asking for a way to keep the licenses internal without a need for an internet connection.

Thanks for all the great tools you provide to allow us to make incredible work!

[Joelaff]

I completely agree licensing should be simple and painless, because all it does it keep honest people honest. People who are going to steal the software will always find a way.

However; note that if you borrow licenses for offline use they SHOULD auto-renew their borrow automatically. I believe this is at around 3 days before they will expire. The license server should re-check them out, assuming it has an internet connection within the last 3 days. Personally, I think this should happen every 1-2 days maximum to always give you around two weeks without an internet connection.

You can use your borrowed licenses for 14 days without internet connection. Their renewal happens automatically. However, the renewal process requires internet connection at least once during the last 3 days. The renewal is valid from the moment it happened for additional 14 days. Therefore, if you borrowed it on June 1st and renewed it on June 11th, you can use the offline license until June 25th.

https://docs.chaos.com/display/VMAX/...or+Offline+Use

The auto-renew of the borrow has worked well here for a long time. I do still wish the auto-renew would happen more frequently. I also wish that we could have multiple local license servers with offline licenses shared among them. This way if one local license server goes down we can still work/render, and if the internet goes down we can still work/render. (We have two internet connections, but what if a backhoe cuts them both, or a power outage upstream causes both connections to fail (Every ISP has amplifiers/repeaters every so often along the lines, and when these lose power, and their batteries die the line goes dead.) ??? In those cases the honest people who support the software with their money lose access to it, but I can assure you the people stealing the software have no problems like that.

[ramy02]

That would be great if they auto-renew for offline. I don't see a setting anywhere where it will auto renew. I just assumed that they would release. We are on Build 251315.

[Joelaff]

Yeah, it is not very clear, and I didn't understand that until a Chaos rep told me here. Basically, once you borrow the borrowed licenses are auto-renewed for another 14 days within 3d days of their expiration. So in theory, if you have internet to the license server, then you always have at least 3 days offline. If you are nearing that deadline and wish to be safe you can return your licenses and check them out again manually to get a full 14 days. (Of course if that process fails for some reason you would be in trouble, but I have done this a couple times.) It is mainly set it and forget it. Note that borrowed licenses only work with the local license server that borrowed them. So you can't have redundant local license servers, like I would like. We had a license server die when a UPS failed overnight. The rendering stopped and we almost missed a deadline. So the ideal world would let you have multiple local license servers that could share the offline licenses.

[ramy02]

Thanks for pointing this out!