about the new CodeMeter LAN Server feature

Pro:

  • nice that the option exists now
    Con:
  • really annoying bugs/cumbersome workarounds to simply change which computer in a network should get a specific license

usecase: network with multiple touch player licences, want to quickly transfer a commercial license from computer 1 to computer 2 to make some adjustments in the editor without having to manually plug in the dongle.
*problem: *
the way the codemeter server works is, you have to specify a list of IPs that is allowed/disallowed to take one of the licenses. weirdly enough in practice every machine in the local network can get access as long as it’s not actively blocked with an advanced rule.
so each time i want to change on which computer the license is running i have to

  1. Cancel the currently running session in one tab with a click, wait for confirmation
  2. change the list of allowed IPs manually to my desired IP in another tab
  3. for some reason have to change the order of rules that are applied (the order itself doesnt seem to matter, just the fact that the order gets changed) to make them actually work with the new settings
  4. confirm changes and hope that everything worked by checking the running sessions in the first tab

i was hoping it would make sense to write you about user experience feedback here because you are wibu’s direct customers…

You shouldn’t need to cancel the session. Closing TouchDesigner on the machine that currently is using the license should cancel the session. Does it not for you?

I’m unclear why you’d need to change the list of allowed IPs. Why not just leave both of the IPs on the list of allowed IPs, start TD on the second machine, use it. Close it. Start it back on the first machine.

Can you elaborate a bit more maybe?

sure, in our setup it’s not desired to close touchdesigner on one of the machines, but I will try to elaborate more:

We have a setup of ~10 PCs running with a TD Player license, opening the .toe with TD itself instead of the player allows to edit the network once a dongle (with a commercial license) is connected to the PC.
On demand I would like to be able to edit some settings remotely within the TD sketch (via VNC). Right now for this to work I take a dongle and plug it into the PC I want to make changes on.
Due to the nature of the setup, those PCs are rather far apart from each other, so the option of “virtually connecting a dongle via LAN” seems in theory to be the perfect solution for it.
On my Codemeter server PC I have a dongle with a single Commercial License. The problem is, if there are no changes made to the server setup, it seems like the first PC that requests a license gets the single commercial license.
Now my wish would be that I could just transfer this license from one PC to the other via the Webadmin Panel by simply selecting one of the clients for example.
Maybe I expected this kind of setup to be more common than it actually is, but for us it would really mean a great addition to the overall TD workflow, especially in large scale applications where client PCs might be far away from each other or remote maintenance is needed…

That’s interesting however I don’t think we are looking to add support for that use case right now. It seems like it would require a new UI in TouchDesigner to manually grab and release licenses from dongles. It also seems like it would require a mode to turn off the automatically acquisition of licenses that TD currently does from dongles.

as i said in my first post, it’s actually possible to get the wanted result by just using the webadmin panel, just it’s not made for that right now…
i think a UI layer/tab in the webadmin using the existing API and just some minor additions there could solve the problem too, maybe not as elegant but maybe something like:
API.cancelSession(id)
API.inovkeNewIPRuleset(ruleset)

unfortunately i didnt find any public docs for the web API that they are using at WIBU