Good morning. I was on a Southwest flight last night and the Wi-Fi wasn’t working. I needed to use Rhino but my one license is in the zoo (since I share it between my desktop and laptop in my office). When I tried to open it it said it couldn’t get a license so I had to find other work to do for the entire flight. I determined at that moment to figure out how to prevent this in the future because I know you guys made away.
So, if I open Rhino on my laptop before I leave on a trip and it obtains the license through my office Internet, will that license be in effect on the laptop and allow me to open Rhino in the absence of all Internet connections as long as I don’t start Rhino on my desktop and move the license back? Unless I open the Rhino on my desktop, will the license on my laptop keep working indefinitely, even if it never sees the Internet again, or does Rhino need to refresh the license occasionally with an internet connection?
Hi
Your license is in your login account and uses the Cloud Zoo floating license manager.
Since the Internet is not perfectly reliable, we make it reliable by making a local license lease file when you login. The lease is good for about 2 weeks. The lease is automatically refreshed and extended when you start Rhino with an Internet connection. If you don’t have a connection and the lease is still valid, the license refresh will fail silently and Rhino will run anyway. You will be warned when the lease is down to a couple days.
My guess is your laptop is not normally used for Rhino, or in this case it’s been 3 weeks or more since Rhino was run on it with an Internet connection. Your lease expired and you did not refresh it before traveling.
In the future, when you’re packing your toothbrush for a trip, pull out the laptop and start Rhino to refresh the license lease. Then you’ll be fine for the flight with no Internet.
You can check the local lease in Options > Licenses. It will tell you when the lease will expire.
The Rhino Notification Panel also records the license lease refresh or failure.