Hello all, and sorry if this information can be found elsewhere–I’ve looked around a bit, but to no avail.
I have a small team using Rhino 6 via Cloud Zoo, and I have several times had staff report to me that Rhino 6 has, while logged in and having pulled a license from Cloud Zoo, in the middle of a work session, reported to them that no licenses are available and effectively prevented them from using the software further. It seems to happen when another user attempts to pull a license and none are available–but, strangely, that user does pull a license, and the previously licensed user is left in the lurch. I wouldn’t think this would be possible, and it certainly isn’t the normal behavior–what I typically observe is that a user attempting to start Rhino 6 when no licenses are available is simply told as much via pop-up, and the software doesn’t start. Am I missing something here?
Thanks in advance for any information that you can provide.
In a scenario where there are more users than licenses (i.e. with high “contention”), the moment a user closes Rhino on their computer their license is freed to the pool for other users to use, unless they are not connected to the internet. So as long as there is a session of Rhino running on a user’s computer, they cannot be kicked out. But if they close Rhino and go grab some coffee, somebody else may have taken the license by the time they come back.
A physical location should not be a factor in the equation.
Thanks AJ. What you describe is exactly how I would assume the system works–however, what I’m observing is people actively using the software and then receiving the ‘no licenses available’ popup during an active work session–no closing, no nothing. The popup appears over an open Rhino 6 window. The problem is intermittent, the next time it recurs I will try to gather some more detailed evidence.
If Rhino is open on the computer, then it should not happen. Are the computers connected to the internet constantly? Or do they get on and off the internet often?
Hey y’all. I’m still having issues with this problem. Please see the attached screenshot showing the licensing popup over an active Rhino window. This is the behavior we experience most often.
Same issue here. The users with the active Rhino license gets kicked out while they still have Rhino running on their machine. The chances of that happening are unlikely but we’ve noticed if the user trying to get a license just keeps clicking to try again (say 50 times) they’ll eventually kick the other user out.
We’ve had the issue with computers in continuous active use. I wouldn’t know if Rhino was the window in focus but we’ve managed to replicate it with a machine that was online and Rhino would had been used in the last ~10min.
I don’t know if this would be useful info but, both machines have non-Zoo licenses for Rhino 5 and are sharing a Rhino 6 license through Cloud Zoo.
When Rhino closes completely on your system or your computer is disconnected from the network (either because of shutting down, disconnecting from WiFi or a network failure) the license is instantly freed and up for grabs in the team. When the computer reconnects, it may be forced to renegotiate a license with the server. If there are no more licenses, then you will get the dialog that you are seeing.
At the risk of sounding crude, getting this message often is a sign of too much contention–too little licenses for the amount of users in the team.
At the risk of sounding crude, Rhino 6 is not yet ready for primetime for us. Issues with blocks breaking on perfectly valid Rhino 5 models and dimensions moving on us has had us hold off from getting Rhino 6 licenses for every workstation. Right now, we’re using Rhino 6 as a glorified .step importer as Rhino 5 sometimes has issues trimming surfaces properly and to speed up make2D…
It seems odd to me to dismiss this problem as network problem or an issue with the logistics of not having enough licenses. All our workstations are hardwired and our Internet connection is coming in on fibre shared in a small company. I know for a lot of offices, Rhino plays second fiddle to another CAD and it would only make sense to have more users than licenses - hence I don’t think it would be crazy to expect the ‘no license available’ message to show up once in a while. Our issue is that sporadically, the licenses don’t get negotiated correctly and the first user gets kicked out and is unable to save his work, even though his machine has remained active.
I have to agree with Louis here. Running out of licenses is not an issue for us–we’re a small enough company to communicate pretty effectively about availability, and if we run into a recurring availability issue, we’ll happily buy more licenses (with some of the other kinks being worked out, we haven’t fully transitioned from v5, and we aren’t in a huge hurry). The problem is that users are losing their work because they suddenly and unexpectedly don’t have the license they pulled from the zoo–not at all what we were used to with Rhino 5 or the pre-cloud Zoo. And I also have to second the opinion about this not being a network problem–all of our workstations are connected via a wired LAN that is practically brand new, and our WAN connection has been stellar since the day we moved in. If there were more robust mechanic in place to protect users from data loss during the ‘renegotiation’ process, this might be less of an issue–but right now this feature is behaving a lot like a bug, in my eyes.
If there were more robust mechanic in place to protect users from data loss during the ‘renegotiation’ process
If there is not a chance to save your work, then this is indeed a bug. Rhino will always give you the opportunity to save your work before closing in case you no longer have a license (In Cloud Zoo mode).
Can you please send a set of screen shots, or a short video, of the process where the user is told they don’t have a license and then are not allowed to save? It may help us figure out how to reproduce these conditions and fix the bug.
It looks like your team has 11 users sharing four licenses, and that’s totally fine with us. Our internal team is also license bound (while it would be easy for us to have way more licenses than users, it doesn’t make for very good testing of real-world situations), but we haven’t seen lack of saving as an issue.
@aj1 this looks like another example where having a client-side log of all the cloud-zoo related activities would be useful for evaluating the process after something goes wrong.
@brian@aj1 Okay, looks like I put my foot in my mouth here. We are able to save from the dialogues provided – just a case of us not exploring all the options. That is a major relief, and I’ve ensured that my team knows what to do.
That having been said, now that I have experimented with the system a bit more, I do have another complaint: it seems like the conditions for ‘inactivity’ that release a license are far too easy to meet in the course of a normal workday. From what I can tell (and correct me if I’m wrong), if a Rhino session doesn’t get user input for about 5 minutes, it becomes ‘inactive’ and releases the license. This is an issue for us – we have a lot of impromptu stand-up meetings in our office to go over drawings, etc., and obviously sitting back down at your desk to implement changes after such a meeting and discovering that you lost your Rhino license is a bit of a headache. Is it possible that the inactivity conditions could be made configurable by the administrator? Our office for one would prefer a more static system, more akin to what we were used to with Zoo (although the ability to pull licenses when out of the office is a big, big plus).
I agree that a client-side log would be very helpful. Another feature that I would love to see is the ability for the administrator to remotely ‘force inactive’ or terminate a session, maybe from the ‘Live Usage’ view?
