Dongle Servers

[Watcher]

Hi folks,

 

This one is a bit off topic but maybe can be useful to some...

 

For a long time our team were using USB dongles for some specific applications and the dongles were going from one hand to another... that was not a good thing but my hands were a bit tied: I could not float the licenses because some apps don't have this option and also because some apps like CrashGuard Studio we have just one license, and no plans to increase since we also have Vericut.

 

I was recommended to use this, bought one and now I don't worry about people forgetting our dongles in their pockets and going home anymore... or when they locked the dongles in their lockers and went home in a Friday and the other programmer showed up at Saturday and needed the dongle... oh boy...

 

http://www.dongle-server.com/

 

I have no association with this company... I'm just sharing a solution for a common problem... I'm using it here with TopSolid, CrashGuard Studio and VAM Threads... Missler, the makers of TopSolid recommended it to us as they refused to issue our licence based on a MAC address, since we use a virtual server...

 

Hope that helps,

 

Daniel

[JAMMAN]

That is really cool, I wonder if you could set it up vpn so you could log in to it from home also? You can do that with nethasp. Any idea the price?

[Watcher]

If you can VPN, you can use it from home. That was one of the benefits we got - I can now run CGStudio from home and no worries about the dongle whereabouts anymore...

 

The price is a bit salty, aprox. US$900,00 - But compared to the headaches we were exposed before, it's a well worth investiment IMHO...

[GnoGueyJose]

Says almost $900 on Amazon. Not bad.

[JAMMAN]

I imagine that is what nethasp is doing, using the host computer as a dongle server since you still need the physical device attached. If just running Mastercam you wouldn't need dongle-server. Nethasp is cool IMO, one of the most useful advances in Mastercam history.

[Watcher]

I imagine that is what nethasp is doing, using the host computer as a dongle server since you still need the physical device attached. If just running Mastercam you wouldn't need dongle-server. Nethasp is cool IMO, one of the most useful advances in Mastercam history.

 

Not sure if this has changed but AFAIK Mastercam Nethasp is basically a floating license server for Mastercam... They issue you a key file based on a dongle ID to be run on a license server in your network - This dongle with a specific ID needs to be attached to the license server computer and the license server service will issue / deny licenses for clients across the network... this is a common scenario...

 

In our case, we have applications that do not support floating licenses or the number of seats is so small that it's not worth to float them... so the schema was basically plug/unplug the dongle in the PC of each user...

 

We were not happy with that (Risky for the software vendors and for us) but it was working... then we wanted to install TopSolid license server in a virtual server and Missler refused to issue keys for it... most vendors don't make objections to that, and CNC Software can be one of them. We have Vericut licensed to the MAC of a virtual server and CGTech is OK with that... moreover, our IT security policy prohibits the attachment of any USB device to a server farm... and this is our case with the virtual servers...

 

So we could not have a license based on the MAC of the engineering server nor could attach a USB dongle to it... and this dongle server was the solution - Of course that it also solved the other issues we had with non-Missler software...

 

PS: The reason why some vendors do not issue MAC based licenses to virtual servers is that in a virtual server the admin can set the MAC as he wants... although our company would never allow that (Yes, we are very serious about software licensing ), in theory we could expand our license pool by x, where x is the number of virtual servers running with the same MAC...