Does that work? Can Zoo communicate through Internet/VPN ?
Rhino 5 can communicate with Zoo 5 servers across a VPN. Generally there is no additional configuration on the VPN side required.
Rhino 4 “can” also communicate with Zoo 4 servers across a VPN. Some VPN products don’t support the older protocol used by Zoo 4, so they will never work. And, getting it to work can be a huge pain because of its use of NetBIOS.
http://wiki.mcneel.com/zoo/home
– Dale
With Zoo 4, the communication across VPN is even more complicated because of routing. Zoo 4 was a bidirectional communication where the server needed to be able to talk back to Rhino periodically. This required complex routing rules that allowed the Zoo to broadcast and directly talk back through the VPN.
Zoo 5 did away with bidirectional communication, favoring a client-driven communication model where only the Rhino client initiates communication with the Zoo. This drastically simplifies the networking requirements, since it works exactly like a web browser - if your browser can see the Zoo server, so can your Rhino.
Thanks guys,
then the next question, does it support Brazil, flamingo etc. now? (wiki says it doesn’t)
And if not, when will it? It’s urgent for an efficient use of the Rhino package.
-j
If I may jump in with a related question:
Are Rhino licenses (and McNeel licenses in general) global? or regional? For instance, could a multinational organization theoretically serve licenses from a single Zoo server to users anywhere in the world?
Taking this line of inquiry a little further: if a single customer organization chose to have Zoo servers on several continents for practical reasons, can the Zoos communicate to back each other up so that the “Zoo network” can effectively serve the globe even if one of the servers goes down?
As I see it, this would be useful from a global customer’s point of view in that it would only need to concern itself with the total number of licenses it has purchased and not be concerned with administering license use by region or any other subdivision of use.
Conversely, if McNeel does have a regional license policy, who enforces it: McNeel or the customer?
Please forgive me if these questions seem a bit naive, as I am a single license customer. I’m just curious how it works, since in a former life I worked with a global system.
Theoretically you could have one zoo serving licenses worldwide. We don’t provide a distributed or redundant server option. If/when we do develop that, it will be part of an Enterprise Zoo product that will cost more.
If you run one Zoo for the entire world, and a part of the network connection goes down, then your clients in all or part of the world (depending on the location of the outage) will be without Rhino. We encourage people to install the Zoo in the same physical location as the client computers.