Bangalore, India
Fixed-seats licensing of GeoTools/CADPower is made based on two types of computer identification methods - either a disk based appkey or MAC-address based appkeys. The appkeys are short for application keys and are nothing but a series of numbers that represent a unique code to identify your computer.
In the case of a disk-based appkey, the serial number of the primary hard disk is used while in the other case, the Media Access Control (MAC) address is used. Both methods are quite reliable and have been in use for the past many years. However, there are certain situations when either one may not work correctly.
For instance, in the case of disk-based appkeys, we noticed that computers which did not have a primary hard disk as the fixed hard disk, or those which were configured as pure virtual disk drives did not produce a valid disk-based appkey. In such a case, it is required to use MAC-address based appkeys.
Even MAC-address based appkeys can sometimes fail. This can happen under some conditions where the MAC-address is composed of only one token of address. Normally, the MAC-address returns a number containing 2 or 4 tokens of addresses, each containing 6 codes, making a total of 12 or 24 codes respectively. Depending on the network status, whether connected or not, the MAC-address varies. Our software requires a match of atleast 2 tokens for the license test to pass. We noticed that there are some instances where the MAC-address produces only 1 token. Although the software licensing mechanism can be programmed to accept the match of only 1 token, we have set it to require a match of atleast 2 tokens for the license match to succeed. This is because of security reasons. If your MAC-address produces only 1 token of address code, you cannot use MAC-address licensing and must switch to disk-based appkeys.
Here is an illustration of what a 4 token, 2 token and 1 token MAC-address appkey will look like:
Single token appkkey: 00:0C:29:D1:3C:56 (not acceptable, contains 6 address codes)
We cannot predict what kind of MAC-address code your computer may produce. This post helps you identify what to interpret out of the appkeys your computer has produced when your run the CP_APPKEY or GT_APPKEY command in CADPower and GeoTools.
In fact, the appkey dialog box (shown above) shows both disk-based and MAC-address based appkeys. You can send both to us and we can decide which of it to use for a successful licensing of our software on your computer.
I hope this post will enlighten our GeoTools/CADPower users about some licensing mechanisms, their strengths and limitations. As you can see, along with the floating network license, we have vastly improved the licensing technologies used in GeoTools and CADpower now.
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