Thank you!
Looks like the service is coming up in a general just right now for more people across the US.
Once again, we apologize for the inconvenience. It should be working more reliably now.
Thanks for your help. Rhino 6 is back working now.
However, I wonder, as an optional backup measure, if an old fashioned hardware key, such as the one I still have for Vray, may help in case someone has urgent need to use Rhino for a delivery. Personally, I would be more than happy to pay an additional fee to have such a key and to be free from any future cloud problem. Additionally, it may also resolve the problem of being disconnected from the Internet for an unpredictable amount of time (including carrying around a laptop to show projects to clients in areas without internet signal) with the license unable to work.
It’s difficult to prepare for every possible type of outage, but we’re putting together some ideas that may make problems like this much less severe in the future. I don’t want to promise anything yet, so I’ll leave out the details. Ideally, we’d like you to be able to continue to run without having to find anything special (including your license key).
I know it’s not fair but I’m pissed due a lost day. And an excuse for having ms azure blackout won’t help.
Paranoid licensing is at the cost of us.
Even the adobe people make not so much trouble.
Please consider alternative solutions
Hi Florian,
You have every right to be pissed. I’d be pissed if I lost a day, too. And I agree with you - when our servers aren’t working right - even if it’s not our fault - you should be impacted as little as possible.
Now that CloudZoo is running, we’re reviewing what went wrong, how we responded, and how we can minimize this kind of impact in the future.
You are always welcome to switch your license to a single-computer license. It requires no internet connectivity, nor any of our servers to run (except a one-time license validation). This is the most robust licensing option I can offer, but it comes with a different cost: you can’t share your license on multiple computers.
Hi Brian, I know it is pre-history, but, personally, I still believe that a hardware key would solve quite a lot of problems. It could be optional for who would request it. I understand that the entire software world is being lately designed for big corporations with hundreds of workstations, but there are still millions of users who do not work for corporations and only occasionally need to transfer the licence on different computers when needed (for example, when showing work to clients out of the office). Vray gives me this option. When I go around, I don’t need an internet connection (which indeed is not always possible, as the world is not necessarily well covered as the US), I just plug the hardware key and I am ready to work.
You are right regarding current software license trends affecting users. With other software, I am having to rely on “old” licences, because, with the subscription-cloud license, I have big problems, if for some reasons I cannot be connected. It is possible to monitor, even with a free firewall, the outward communication and see that the licensing software constantly checks the cloud license. You may be amazed by how many times this happens (including analytic usage data). Fortunately, this is not Rhino case though!
I’d say this a bit differently: there are lots of different kinds of customers that use software like Rhino, and each of them want it to work really well for them, in their use case. Big schools and companies want flawless, easy deployment to hundreds of workstations and simple license management. Students want to run the software inexpensively on their laptop and on a more powerful computer. Small companies sometimes want a little of each.
The Cloud Zoo was designed to work for all of these use cases. And it does (except when it isn’t working at all, of course). For people working in high security environments, we offer the Zoo and single-computer licensing.
As with all advancements, there are side effects. We’re working to minimize those side effects.
We supported hardware keys in Rhino 3. It was by far the biggest cause of difficult to solve support issues for us and our customers. Just like the Cloud Zoo, these keys are not foolproof: people lose them, people break them, they get washed along with clothes and ruined. In all cases, customers can’t use the software, lose a day (then pay a lot for next-day shipping of a new one), and are angry. The difference between that and cloud outages is that the problems happen for everyone all at the same time; but the problems are really basically interchangeable.
Thanks Brian, I didn’t know this part of the history sorry. Since Rhino 1.0, I never had license problems of any kind and never had a hardware key. Of course, if someone puts a key in the washing machine, he/she can also put his/her computer in a swimming pool and then hope that Rhino will work! The difference between schools, companies, corporations and singles users, is that organizations have an IT department looking after their machines, whilst singles user/small companies don’t have these facilities and have to solve problems by themselves. In my case, for example, I am very grateful to Carlos from your office in Barcelona, who immediately helped me, otherwise I would have not known what to do. I am confident that you will find a very good solution to resolve these license issues as always. Thanks Luca