ValidLicenseClients tag in LAN Zoo config.xml

wcmansp · February 15, 2021, 1:59am

What’s the purpose of this tag, particularly in relation to accessing LAN Zoo licenses? Ours shows our AD suffix and, in what seems to be a very recent development, machines which had been able to get a license, but are not AD members, are no longer able to. We did check the Zoo Service firewall settings – we had run into the default “same subnet” setting with an earlier Zoo upgrade – but these looked fine. We also turned the firewall off completely – no change. We haven’t yet restarted the server (machine), although we have restarted the License Server several times, and I haven’t seen anything stating that Cloud Zoo was the only solution for remote use. Is the tag not relevant, and we should be looking at other local possibilities?

dale · February 16, 2021, 5:02pm

Hi @wcmansp,

ValidLicenseClients is not used by the LAN Zoo.

Also, the LAN Zoo does not use Active Directory for authentication.

I don’t know what this is. Where are you seeing this?

On the systems that cannot get Rhino licenses from the LAN Zoo, have you run the Zoo Diagnostic?

https://wiki.mcneel.com/zoo/diagnostics

More LAN Zoo issues are either firewall or routing/DNS issues.

– Dale

wcmansp · February 16, 2021, 5:50pm

You are right. This turns out to be, somewhat inexplicably (ie. it wasn’t that way last week), a firewall issue. We’re working to get that resolved. The tag is one that appears in the config.xml file (%ProgramData%\McNeel\Zoo\7.0) on the license server machine. We came across it during the attempt to track down the problem, noticing that (coincidentally) all the machines showing license connections matched this pattern. A check of the Usage data, later, showed there were a couple of machines that didn’t match this pattern, so our inference about this was wrong. The problem is not with Rhino or LAN Zoo.

Thanks for this – we had no clear idea why this had stopped working.

–Bill