I’ve contacted support a couple of times, but I’ve received no response. I have multiple licences that I had to manually generate a key as they couldn’t connect to get one. This also meant that I couldn’t remove the licence before the computers had to be wiped, as they couldn’t contact the server to remove the licences.
I need a quick way to remove licenses / reset all my licenses on my account. It’s happening quite often now that I need to activate a device, run it for a day or two, then deactivate and wipe the computer. Could you please let me know how this can be done if you are unable to contact the server to do so?
Thanks,
Matt J
Uninvited take: This is what cloud licenses are for, or even dongles. The reason for the behavior you’re seeing is that TD does not ‘phone home’ whenever you activate a license, hence, the activation server thinks your license is in use from the moment you generate an activation code until you successfully deactivate the license online. This is a desired behavior because there are many, many scenarios where you will have to activate a license with no network access.
Hi r-ssek, thanks for your response. I do understand I was just at an event in Vegas had 20 machines to setup, and only 3 of them could contact the servers so i had to make keys for them all. This means I had no way to get the key off them after. I wasn’t aware of the dongles, but I fear that buying one and losing it would be very annoying. Having 20 licences on it or buying 20 of them with one licence in each would be annoying. It’s just a shame you can’t generate a limited-time key. This would be amazing to create a key that lasts 2 weeks, for instance, then it fails after that.
1 Like
Now that’s an interesting idea: time-bound keys!
Here’s another one that requires a bit of elbow grease: Install a PCIe card in your servers that has an internal USB port, install the dongles there, out of prying hands’ reach, IIRC there are CodeMeter dongles with a small form-factor. Either way, activating and deactivating 10+ servers will remain a bit annoying and you have to plan for it. That said, we have had success getting licences back from the grave under certain conditions, hope you get a response from licensing soon.
Another Note on Dongles, especialy for setups like you described:
You can create your own “Floating” License with a License Dongle in a local network.
So you can create your own small Computer providing the licenses for all of the 20 devices.
check out “Sharing Licenses Over a Network”
I would probably still go with a single dongle per license per PC but for larger setups like you are describing this might not be totaly the wrong approach.
1 Like
I have never had a problem getting Derivative to release licenses in this situation unless they have had a recent policy change. Are you contacting licensing@derivative.ca directly?
Not sure why but my emails had been marked as spam they have now fixed this and I have my licence keys back. I will look at the dongle idea for our next event I’m just not a fan of a simple point of failure and having all the keys on one dongle wouldn’t be great if it got lost. Also buying 20-30 dongles to put a licence on each seems like a waste of dongles and an needless expense. I suppose the third option could be to keep a computer in my office with the dongle in to licence all then use a VPN to connect back when needed so will look into this as a viable option.
I am pretty sure I have requested as a wish list item, the ability to set a client side expiration date when creating a license for this exact use case. That expiration date would be stored on client and server. On the client it will auto-release the key and on the server side it will make it available again. Event based work on rental gear can be chaos at times. If you miss your window for event tear down and the AV vendor sends back the equipment you have lost your chance.
1 Like