Urgent help needed: Licensing snafu following server crash

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Fairlight" <fairlite at fairlite.com>
To: <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
Sent: Friday, September 21, 2007 10:12 AM
Subject: Re: Urgent help needed: Licensing snafu following server crash


> Is it just me, or did Brian K. White say:
>> filepro, even with the simple licence file in 5.0.15 not even the licence
>> manager daemon, is functionaly broken for me. I can't use it. I actually 
>> can
>> not use it. I can't live with the potential for even 12 or even 6 hours 
>> of a
>> box being down due to a broken filepro licence while we wait for 
>> filepro's
>> business hours to roll around. Early mornings happen to be my customers
>> highest critical time and losing half the morning until 8 or 9 am astern 
>> or
>> central comes around is not tolerable.
>
> It would be aggravating as hell to me, expensive for my clients, but it's
> hardly a case of being wholly unsuitable.  I mean, let's be realistic
> here...some companies lose tens of thousands of dollars if the electricity
> fails for a few seconds--literally.  Does that make the local power grid
> "functionally broken" for them on the whole?  Of course not.
>
> I think you're being a bit melodramatic regarding the (unlikely) impact.
> I'm obviously no fan of license schemes, every last one of which is flawed
> unless program use -requires- an active central server constantly (MMO's
> have the -only- real protection that works, and they are really a service
> more than the initial software).  That hardly makes everything that has
> a license manager (or worse) unusable.  If it does, don't tell all the
> CAD users with dongles in play.  And if some prankster walks off with a
> dongle, you really think it'll be replaced freely?  How long for shipping?
> Comparatively, fP users still have it ok--just not ideal.
>
> I'm sorry, but putting it into perspective, some very busy, very important
> companies ate a very large outage on 9/11/01 and for at least a week
> afterwards, and in more than their software working, I might add.  I'm
> betting 95%+ survived and are still in business.  Let's be pragmatic 
> enough
> to accurately call licence enforcement what it is: stupid, a waste of R&D
> funds, and annoying.  But it's a calculated risk, like anything else, and 
> a
> fairly low one at that.  If it's triggered, it's a cost of doing business
> with many major vendors, like it or not.  If a company has no disaster or
> emergency plan in place that the could choose to implement or not 
> depending
> on perceived loss/exposure, then someone isn't doing their job adequately
> somewhere.  Tossing effective software over -potential- license failure is
> ridiculous--planning for things that can be anticipated for isn't.  Does 
> it
> cost more?  Yes.  But that's the cost of doing business properly.
>
> Now -stupid- is -requiring- a net connection to activate at all.  Like
> Adobe and a growing number of others that are alienating people whose
> policies may not allow it even if the physical link is present.  Again, fP
> doesn't sound so bad by comparison.

I _will_ modify every box that has users overnight some time or other.
Sometimes a box will go years without needing to be replaced or majorly 
repaired or cloned off to some other physical location, other times I may 
need to do something like that every night for a week. The users never know 
the difference given that they just log in to my_company.aljex.com and I 
point their hostname wherever I just copied their code to, if I had to move 
it anywhere. This type of change will _always_ happen over night or over a 
weekend or other holiday when it is planned, and only during business hours 
when it is unplanned.

That _will_ break that boxes fp license, as far as I understand it so far.

Generally, on further reflection you might be right though, I can generally 
move users to other, already working boxes, and can physically afford to 
have one box down for a while, but it's a pain to move all users to some 
other box, especially since generally it has to be distributing them to 
several other boxes since they all already have their own user load, and 
then move them all back the next night. That's asking me to do a lot of 
work, twice, eating up 2 nights, or at least a few hours out of the middle 
of two nights, just to do the same job I can do now without any extra work 
at all.  No one can tell me it's reasonable to accept this increase in my 
workload and increase in the time it takes me to get a given job done and 
the resulting downgrade in the customers service.

The 7 day grace is nice, and is fine as long as fp is around and they don't 
change the deal and continue to honor repairing existing licenses. ... You 
know the _main_ reason we use BackupEDGE now? Because Unitrends, who is 
still in business, just decided one day to stop supporting ctar, which we 
had on _all_ boxes at that point, even to the point of not fixing licenses 
which broke as a natural consequence of doing a tape restore.  I don't care 
what any vendor promises any more, I simply do not place my foot where I am 
not sure whats under it any more if I can possibly help it. It's absolutely 
no ones place to tell anyone else they should accept bad deals and 
downgrades in functionality and give up security. And so it's not your place 
to tell that to me.

The power company has a strict license manager (the meter on the side of the 
building), but they are not the only supplier of power. I can and do 
suppliment the power grid several different ways with batteries and 
generators. They all use some sort of other infrastructure, which also might 
fail, but I am free to minimize risk by employing several different types of 
power and hopefully not everything fails at once. And if the power grid 
dies, _and_ the gas lines, _and_ gas stations, _and_ the various forms of 
transportation to gas stations,  all at once, then that would probably 
require an event of such magnitude that no one can even use computers or 
software anyways since we'd all be running for the hills and trying to find 
an animal to eat and a cave to hide in as we hide from the aliens or the 
mega-tsunami or the radioactive cloud or whatever. Short of that, the power 
company doesn't hold a special key that they must renew periodically or else 
my servers stop working. I can make them work regardless what the power 
company does or does not do and I'm not necessarily screwed if they turn me 
off. This is not the case with filePro. I am entirely logical in identifying 
this filepro situaton as a weak point and an achilles heel, a newely 
invented and inflicted one BTW not one I knowingly bought into years ago, 
and seeking to eliminate it. (not eliminate filepro if I don't have to, 
eliminate the weak point.)

Brian K. White    brian at aljex.com    http://www.myspace.com/KEYofR
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