I have a school here as a customer and I have a meeting scheduled with them to discuss how they can handle their lab license (which they already have). Currently the lab license is installed in a LAN Zoo server and is only used for like 6 fixed computers in their small lab.
They want to be able to lend out licenses to students on their laptops for classroom or home use. I told them this is totally possible - in fact recommended - with the lab license in the Cloud Zoo.
What I don’t know is if they remove the lab license from their LAN Zoo and put it in a Rhino account (Team) for student access as team members, how does it work to get the licenses to the lab machines - who don’t have an e-mail address or a Rhino account?
Just a clarification before someone who knows looks into this…
I understand that the machines don’t have an eMail address or Rhino Account, but the people that use those machines do, or… ?
-wim
Yeah, but it’s a computer lab… Those computers need to be able to run Rhino regardless of whether the person using it is in a team or not… Yes, I guess it could be connected to the school’s entire domain, but I’m not sure they want to do that. Plus I don’t know how that works remotely.
As Wim mentioned, someone (a member of the team containing the lab license) would need to login to Rhino on the lab machines. This could be a dedicated user account, but this won’t work well if the students user their own Windows/macOS login credentials on the lab computers because Rhino’s user account data is tied to a user profile, i.e. not machine-wide. The potential pitfalls of having students login using their own Rhino accounts are that (a) they need to be in the team, and (b) they need to remember to logout at the end of their session. The former is made easier with a domain-linked team if there are many students that would need to be invited to the team.
Before going down the Cloud Zoo route, have they considered giving students access to the LAN Zoo server and allowing them to checkout licenses to go off campus, or giving them remote access via a VPN?
Hi Will,
Thanks. Finally I think we’re going to go with a two-zoo solution, LAN Zoo with one lab license for the lab computers - there are actually more than I thought, 20 or more - and a Cloud Zoo for with one or possibly two lab licenses to distribute to students on their laptops.