Amazon EC2 TurboFloat

Hi Wyatt,

we love your product.

We now have an additional situation that appears a little bit complicated:- We are thinking about licensing libraries of our software. The potential customer wants to try it out for a year before making a final decision. Even more complicated: He may actually want to run it on several Amazon EC2 instances. Its somewhat expensive.

So: is there a way we can enable floating licenses for (five) EC2 instances that end 1 year after the activation? I figure the only way would be requiring the FloatingLicense Sever to connect once for the activation at least with the activation server (plus at times after)

So there are essentially two options, right?- Offline trial extensions & TurboFloat: End the trial after 100 days; No internet connection required; No control over # computers- TurboFloat & five license slots with internet connection: #of computers is under control; internet connection required; 365 days test period can only be "switched off" through deactivating license key within LimeLM & setting the verification period to like 12/13 months.

There is no such thing as "offline trial with maximum number of floating offline trials" - is there? It would make only medium sense as one could just set up a number of floating servers as well then...

Do you have any recommendations of the time period we should use to check whether the license is still active? I would probably set it to 13 months or so "to be safe" - but I carefully want to check whether there may be some hidden downside I do not recognize with those very long periods (e.g. swifty way to actually use it 24+ months).

Thanks a lot!Very versatile product. Love it.Jan.

Hey Jan,

we love your product.

I'm glad to hear that. 🙂

So: is there a way we can enable floating licenses for (five) EC2 instances that end 1 year after the activation? I figure the only way would be requiring the FloatingLicense Sever to connect once for the activation at least with the activation server (plus at times after)

Floating licenses would be the best option. You could use TurboActivate as well, but EC2 and AWS servers aren't real servers -- so the fingerprints change if the "machine" is shut down and then booted back up again (because they're glorified VMs running on different hardware).

Short answer: TurboFloat is the best solution to that problem.

- Offline trial extensions & TurboFloat: End the trial after 100 days; No internet connection required; No control over # computers

I don't know where your read that, but with the TurboFloat Server (even if it's activated offline) you can limit precisely how many computers will be able to request and get license leases. So you can limit it to 5. And set a custom license field for the product key with a set "expiration date". Read the license field in your app using TF_GetFeature(), and if the date has passed, then the customer can no longer use your app.

You can do this with online activations too.

Do you have any recommendations of the time period we should use to check whether the license is still active? I would probably set it to 13 months or so "to be safe" - but I carefully want to check whether there may be some hidden downside I do not recognize with those very long periods (e.g. swifty way to actually use it 24+ months).

We recommend 90 days (and that's the maximum number of days it can be set to).

Tell me if that helps.

Thank you very much, this was exactly the answer I was looking for. This helps me a lot. I am sorry for the confusion regarding offline activation with Turbofloat (I am not the one implementing LimeLM, just writing the specs 😉 ). Best,Jan

Sorry, another quick one:is there a reliable way just to determine whether the software runs on a cloud instance? Or should we try some other workaround (e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/33619402/how-to-determine-if-a-server-is-amazon-ec2-from-command-line) Note: we want to have one version that only runs on "non cloud instances" and another one that does run on cloud instances (with the TurboFloat Server). Apologies for the inconveniences caused.Jan

EC2 is just a VM. So, you'd detect it like you'd detect any other VM, using TurboActivate's proprietary algorithm. See here: Licensing from inside a virtual machine or hypervisor. And if you even want to prevent trials on VMs, then again, use UseTrial(TA_DISALLOW_VM).

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