Currently i’m sitting on a mac and i ordered a node-locked license for krakatoa. So i recieved a single file named “Thinkbox_license_my_name.lic”. So this is basically what i have. Maybe i missed something, but i have no idea where to put this file to make it work. I tried the C4D plugins folder, my user folder and the C4D root folder. If i choose the krakatoa renderer under the rendersettings in Cinema4D i get this error:
Can someone give me a short walkthrough, what i have to do with this license file? Do i need to download anything else if i have a node-locked license?
Edit: As of Beta 3, to set up a node-locked license, please follow these steps:
Open Cinema 4D, and select “Krakatoa” as the renderer.
Under the renders settings, select the “Licensing” tab.
In the licensing tab, enter in the path to your “.lic” node-locked license.
Render (this will attempt a license checkout).
Edit: The following are no longer necessary as of Beta 3:
Hey there! Not much else needs to be done.
It looks like we haven’t implemented our fancy license dialog yet for C4D, but that’ll come soon I’m sure. In the meantime, here’s some way to handle this:
Standard Flex (easiest):
If you want to go the standard flexlm route, it tries to read the license as a (probably) non-existent file “/usr/local/flexlm/licenses/license.dat”. If you create those folders, then put your license file in place as “license.dat” in there, it should just work.
Environment variable (hard on OS X):
Set a system environment variable called “THINKBOX_LICENSE_FILE” and set it to the path of your license. This is a pain on OS X in general (they seem to hate environment variable for some reason), so you can likely avoid that.
That fancy .flexlmrc (OS X and Linux only):
Create a file in your home folder called “.flexlmrc” and put the following line in it:
THINKBOX_LICENSE_FILE=/path/to/license.lic (where this is changed to the path to your license file)
All the following work for the license server too, you just put an “@” symbol, then the host name or IP address of the license server.
I’m going to sticky this guy for anyone else having issues. Also, it may complain about an invalid host-id after you’ve set things up right. If it does, the error should say what the valid host-id is, and you should pass this along to sales so they can change your license. For some zainy reason, on OS X, Flex is very particular about which MAC address we can use.\
I have updated the build to allow the user to specify a license from inside of Cinema 4D. Hopefully this will simplify the whole process. You won’t have to mess around with environment variables or anything else.
Can I confirm the steps specific to node-locked license setup? The steps seem straightforward, but all I’m getting is a freeze, and I’ve wasted a merry hour or two trying to work out which of the steps in the main licensing thread are needed for a node-locked license.
So, I get my license file, received by email, and put it in the C4D folder.
Launch C4D.
Choose Krakatoa renderer.
Press render, get the ‘could not acquire license’ dialog.
Direct this to the license file, click OK. See pic.
My suspicion is that the popup dialog is causing some threading problem within C4D, but we will have to wait for Conrad to come back from holidays on January 2nd to look into that (and fix the typo in the dialog, too).
My design suggestion (which I made too late on the morning of Dec. 24th for it to have any consequences in Beta 2) would be to move the licensing controls to a dedicated rollout in the Krakatoa Render Settings dialog, so no popup would be needed and you could access the settings at any point without calling the renderer. Hopefully we will be able to do something like that for Beta 3.
To quote The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, “We Apologize For The Inconvenience!”
I installed beta 3 for the first time today, and licensing works well with file selection option inside of C4D.
Though, it might be nice to see an indication of Krakatoa being properly licensed, as is the case with other plug-ins in the Personalize section of C4D.
after a few emails with Dwight it turned out that for some reason my Macbook uses the MAC adress of my Wifi port (even if i remove the Wifi port from my system prefs). So i recieved a new license based on the wifi mac adress and everything worked fine with the beta 3. So thanks again! Time to explore some crazy Krakatoa stuff
I have just installed Beta 3 and I cannot get the licence node to work.
I did not really understand what you did with your wifi in order to get Krakatoa renderer to work…
could you give me more details please
When you ordered your license file, you gave them the MAC adress of your ethernet adapter. In my case (i have Krakatoa on my macbook right now) it only worked with the MAC adress of my wifi adapter. So if you are on a macbook and you still have problems, maybe try to send them the MAC adress of the wifi port.
I’m a pretty smart guy, and think this is all waaaaay too complicated.
I have a beta license for Krakatoa for C4D and a separate KrakatoaSR license. For some time, the SR license was working fine, and I briefly had the beta license working as well.
Now, no matter what I do, I can’t get either to run. It doesn’t seem to matter whether I point to the license file or set it up as a service using lmtools.exe, I am getting errors again.
Specifically, at least the first-order problem, it’s complaining about my hostname (which has NOT CHANGED):
“12:35:55 (thinkbox) Wrong hostid on SERVER line for license file:
12:35:55 (thinkbox) C:\FlexLM\Thinkbox_c4d_license_Fiske_Planetarium.lic
12:35:55 (thinkbox) SERVER line says 24be05e1dc75, hostid is “a0369f1fc33e 24be05e1dc74”
12:35:55 (thinkbox) Invalid hostid on SERVER line
12:35:55 (thinkbox) Disabling 1 license from feature krakatoa-cinema4d(0B9D EADA 6FB4 637B )
12:35:55 (thinkbox) Disabling 1 license from feature krakatoa-render(0790 4D8E A87A 77F3 )”
I get the need for software security, I do. But this is 2013, and messing around with this stuff strikes me as unnecessarily complicated and error-prone. I have real work to do and spending a day worrying about this just can’t be a part of that. Hostname-based security? MAC-address-based security? Come on! People don’t work on machines that sit, unchanging, for the duration of use. System names change, NICs change, IPs can change, etc.
</off soapbox>
Note: I recognize that this is a beta program, and I’m not complaining about issues with beta software, I’m complaining about instrusive, finicky DRM systems that get in the way of doing work.
I get the need for software security, I do. But this is 2013, and messing around with this stuff strikes me as unnecessarily complicated and error-prone. I have real work to do and spending a day worrying about this just can’t be a part of that. Hostname-based security? MAC-address-based security? Come on! People don’t work on machines that sit, unchanging, for the duration of use. System names change, NICs change, IPs can change, etc. <<
i’ll let support comment on your specific problems -but i want to respond to your soapbox: this is a learning experience for us, as much as it is painful for you - we also are surprised by the issues. i don’t know if FLEXNET is just unstable on OSX, or what issues we’ve run into, but we’ve been licensing with FLEX for 7 or 8 years [prior to thinkbox, as frantic] and the number of issues recently is a shock.
i think the issues are two-fold: first, most of our flexera users have floating licenses based off a machine that is designated as the license server. i agree that artist’ machines change all the time, but our experience has primarily been at the side of the market where people have dedicated machines and floating licenses for all their products. At frantic/prime etc we had dedicated flex/rlm etc license machine[s] at each location that had been around forever. having a lot more node-locked/local or individual licenses isnt as common for us.
secondly, i think as i suggested earlier that there are some OSX issues we have to work hard to resolve. some of them are experiential [we need bettter installation and troubleshooting tools, documentation etc] and some might be bugs in the OS or the licensing software or even in our software.
i appreciate your patience and most importantly, your testing so we can sort this out and resolve it.
I was able to address this problem (at the expense of my lunch hour…) by re-enabling a NIC that had been disabled for unrelated reasons; the card itself is unused but was causing issues for another piece of software (and isn’t my primary interface) and so had recently been disabled. So, yeah, totally get the cause of this particular issue, and it was not OSX related (Win7 x64).
I’ve had similar issues in the past with hardware-based licensing. Just seems like a problem-prone solution for installations outside of large studios running dedicated license servers, etc., which as you point out aren’t subject to the kinds of changes seen in desktop/workstation environments.
As much as “dongles” often cause issues (usually driver related), they at least offer the dual benefits of a) Hardware protection for the vendor and b) flexibility for the user. Just a thought.
And finally, about patience: I’m happy to deal with these issues, problems and annoyed forum posts notwithstanding. The tools are worth the hassle to get working.
c.
Chris Maytag
Studio manager
Fiske Planetarium
University of Colorado at Boulder
Sorry you had to go through that pain. Because we lock licenses to the MAC address and host name, the interfaces to tie ourselves to do need to be enabled.
