Floating Licenses
Floating licenses are powered by LimeLM TurboFloat Server from wyDay.
This guide will help you get set-up with a license server, on-premise, and instruct BroTools to "lease" a license from it. The server itself can run on any machine and any platform, including Windows, Linux, MacOS or FreeBSD, so long as it is accessible from the machine running BroTools.
Looking for Regular, Site or Enterprise licensing?
If you are looking for Regular, Site or Enterprise licenses, please, proceed here.
Overview¶
On each platform, the procedure is the same.
- Download the server software
- Download TurboActivate.dat file (It can also be found inside
BroTools\core\system
directory) - Place TurboActivate.dat file next to the server executable
- Optionally edit the configuration file
- Activate the server with your Product Key
- Start it up
The server will need to remain running in order for BroTools to lease licenses.
Where to find TurboActivate.dat file¶
A link to appropriate TurboActivate.dat file is emailed to you upon purchase. You can also find the file inside BroTools bundle archive at BroTools\core\system\TurboActivate.dat
, which you can copy and use in further steps as well.
Linux¶
Here's a typical series of commands for an x64 system, look inside the .zip for alternative Linux-based platforms.
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From here, you'll likely want turbofloatserver -x
called automatically on reboot, such that BroTools and Maya can lease licenses from it. The exact procedure varies between Linux distributions and company preferences, so I won't go into details about all of them the procedure, but systemd is a common option. You might also want to add -silent
command flag when running it as a service, so the command would look like: turbofloatserver -x -silent
Autostart with systemd
Here's a rough idea of how you can set it up to autostart on systems using systemd.
Put this into a file at `/etc/systemd/system/brotools_turbofloat.service
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Then run
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More details¶
Windows¶
Here's what you need to do to get TurboFloat server up and running on a Windows machine.
First - Download TurboFloat Server (TFS) for Windows
Unzip the archive. Inside you will find a bin-windows
folder, and inside of it there are sub-directories for different platforms like x64, x86 and ARM, each with it's own TurboFloat.exe file compailed for a different platform. Typically you would use the bin-windows\x64\TurboFloat.exe
.
Download the appropriate TurboActivate.dat file that was emailed to you upon purchse and put it next to the TurboFloat.exe
of your choice.
Finally you will also need to move or copy the TurboFloatServer-config.xml
file from the root of the archive and also put it next to the chosen TurboFloat.exe
file.
You don't have to do it exactly this way
In the end you just need to have a folder with 3 files in it: TurboFloat.exe
, TurboFloatServer-config.xml
, TurboFloat.dat
, like this:
Activate¶
Now you need to activate the server. Use this command in CMD, PowerShell or Windows Terminal:
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There should be no output from the command, unless there's a problem.
Start and Install¶
You can run the server in the current PowerShell or CMD.exe terminal using this command:
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This will not persist after a reboot of the machine. For that we need to Install the server.
To do that you'll need to launch PowerShell or CMD as Administrator and run the following command:
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This "installation" does three things:
- It installs the TurboFloat Server instance as a Windows Service set to start with the computer and run silently in the background.
- It configures the TurboFloat Server to allow inbound connections in the Windows Firewall (unless the Windows Firewall service is disabled, in which case it skips this step).
- It starts the TurboFloat Server immediately.
From here you can try launching BroTools in Maya to see whether it manages to successfully lease a license.
Configuration¶
You may need to adjust the default configuration, because by default TurboFloat is using port 13
and Windows is known to block low port numbers by default. To change the port you need to open TurboFloatServer-config.xml
file and change the line <bind port="13"/>
to a port number of your choice. For example: 1231
More details¶
MacOS and FreeBSD¶
For these operating systems you can refer to the official TurboFloat documentation.
Download TurboFloat Server (TFS) for MacOS
Maya, Workstations¶
Now that you have your license server up and running it is time to set up BroTools to connect to it.
To use Floating licensing BroTools can be installed in a central network shared location or on each machine individually.
Make sure that TurboActivate.dat file exists under BroTools/core/system
folder.
After that, on each Workstation you will need to set an environment variable BROTOOLS_FLOATING
. For example:
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To make changes persistent, for example, on CentOS 7 you can do it like this:
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And reboot.
To unset this variable, remove those lines from ~/.bash_profile
file and reboot. I'm sure there could be a better way of doing this which I may not know of.
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The format of BROTOOLS_FLOATING is {ip-address}:{port-number}. Where port-number is the port number you chose in TurboFloatServer-config.xml
.
TurboFloat Server Offline activation¶
It is possible to activate TurboFloat Server offline.
For that run the following command on the TurboFloat server:
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Then email the resulting file to sup[email protected]. Within 2-5 working days you will receive an ActivationResponse.xml
file in a response email which you can place anywhere and then run the second command:
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This process will be automated in the future.