Using TurboFloat Server on a VM

We want to use TurboFloat licencing for many of our customers. Currently we don't allow TFS keys to activate on virtual machines because of cloning. That is a good solution in some cases, but more of our customers use VMs for all their software and don't want to use a physical machine for the TFS. These customers prefer to rent all their hardware from data centers. They even object to having to rely on a single physical machine on their network.

Do you have any plans to deal with this situation, which is becoming more common? Would it be possible, for example, to check if an activated TFS key is being used simultaneously on different IP addresses? This would require the TFS to contact the LimeLM servers quite frequently, although every few hours would probably suffice.

>> "Do you have any plans to deal with this situation, which is becoming more common? "

Yep, before the end of this year we have a hosted version of the TurboFloat Server instance planned. You or your customers will be able to "spin up" and instance of the TurboFloat Server hosted on our infrastructure. They'll also be able to manage it and view everything about it directly in the upcoming customer portal.

The price is cheap (cheaper than creating a VM instance on AWS, Linode, Azure, etc., etc.) and it has the added benefits of (a) always having the latest backwards-compatible TurboFloat Server instance running and (b) having security (DDoS protection, latest updates, abuse monitoring, etc.).

>> "Would it be possible, for example, to check if an activated TFS key is being used simultaneously on different IP addresses?"

IP addresses aren't a useful indicator of anything. That's why we completely ignore them except for display and informational purposes in LimeLM. See: https://wyday.com/limelm/features/why/#wrong-id

That's very interesting.

Will there be an additional logging-on stage? Because at the moment, if TFS is open to the internet it will grant an available floating licence to any request that knows its IP Address and port number. So an ex-employee of one of our customers could take our software and use it illegally as long as a floating licence is available.

Yes, there will be a unique ID (that will be changeable) in addition to the address of the server and the ability to limit requests to IP ranges (IPv4, IPV6).

The customer will have full control over who has access to the TFS instance.

That sounds very good. Can we have it tomorrow? 🙂

We wish! Soon, though. This is where the majority of our development work is focused at the moment.

Is the WyDay Hosted TurboFloat server going to be an option moving forward? Is it still best-practice to run TurboFloat on a physical server?

>> "Is the WyDay Hosted TurboFloat server going to be an option moving forward?"

Yes. Soon.

>> "Is it still best-practice to run TurboFloat on a physical server?"

At this very moment, yes. Never install TFS on VM. When we release our hosted version of the TurboFloat Server that will be the alternative to customers hosting their TFS instances on physical machines.

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