Typical scenario with schools these days - school has one or more lab licenses in a Rhino account and invites a group of students and/or staff significantly larger than the license count they have, assuming all of them won’t be using Rhino all of the time.
What I am trying to determine is under what conditions is a license attributed to a student/staff person released so that it can be used by others?
Certainly, when one has closed the last Rhino instance on the client machine the license is relinquished - that’s a given. However, many users have a tendency to leave Rhino (and other applications) open constantly even when they are not actively using it (them). And also many rarely restart their machines (especially prevalent with Mac users). So…
Does putting the computer to sleep release a license?
Is there a timeout (aside from automatic the ~20 day offline license renewal obligation) that can be set somewhere?
The idea being to try to maximize the use of existing licenses without having to buy additional lab units to make up for a quantity of “sleeping Rhinos”.
The team / lab environment isn’t as forgiving as the personal Zoo, the idea being that users can’t be booted from a session by others indiscriminately. As you are aware the LAN Zoo has a variable checkout option. Cloud Zoo doesn’t have any additional features in this regard.
The trouble with an inactivity license pull is the potential of unsaved work not having a license available on wake up.
Hi Japhy,
Yes, but the LAN Zoo is far less practical in the sense that it requires students to VPN into the school network to get a license. Managing who can and who can’t access a lab license is also much simpler with teams in the Cloud Zoo.
Well, IMO it doesn’t have to work that way. If for example the computer in question goes to sleep, it could relinquish the license. When it wakes up and Rhino becomes active, it should first ask for a new license. If none are available, it should allow the user to save their work once before closing.
what about automatic backup? Can’t Rhino be notified when the computer is going to sleep, hibernating, even being shut off or user logoff and forcing a backup file creation?
Or even just having these users set up to force a backup every 10 or 15 minutes so if a license is pulled at least the user’s work will be available for retrieval. This might even be a self-correcting solution if the habitual culprit gets sick of having to go through the retrieval process over and over.
I don’t know if that’s something that might sound fine most of the time but as a general product-wide policy is not really the best idea to do unattended?
Addendum -
When the ~20 day limit is reached for offline use of a lab license, does it in fact automatically liberate the license in the Cloud Zoo account?
I’m having a hard time imagining why it would ever be a bad thing, but nevertheless it could be a user-selectable option. Then if a lack of backup upon license retrieval bites a user it will be himself he’s cursing and not McNeel.