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RLM Trouble Shooting Guide

Windows

NODELOCK


Nodelock licenses do not require a license server, and therefor network issues rarely come into play, and they rarely fail to license. Mainly, you need to have a network card for it to base your key off of, and that network card cannot be disconnected or turned off.

If you’re keying a laptop, I’d therefor recommend that you unplug your laptop from the network when you generate your host info, because some power saving configurations on laptops turn off the network card when it’s not attached to anything. Either that or you can go into power saving settings and make sure that the card never gets switched off.

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One really common mistake people make is placing their license after you have received it from us. You need to place it in c:/rlm (its not there by default you need to create this folder . You need to be careful while creating this folder its RLM in lower case and people usually misspell it .

ALL ABOUT FLOATING LICENSES

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Floating licenses require a network server for the RLM license server. Your workstations and render nodes are clients. The client half of RLM is embedded in our software and does not enable it’s operation unless it’s able to find the server and borrow (check out) a license.

Licenses get checked out when the plugin gets loaded in Maya, and do not release the license until it’s unloaded or Maya exits. So, if Maya crashes, you’ll still have a license checked out, but it will get re-used if you re-enter Maya.

NOTE : If your rigger or animator wants to work on a scene that’s got shave in it, you need to have a license on that machine, or the shave data can get stripped off on load. People usually get around this by saving their grooms in a reference file.


We do accommodate some customers who serve licenses from virtual machines, but in general we prefer not to because they are not super secure. We generally reserve enabling that option for customers with hundreds of licenses, this generally implies they have substantial infrastructure, and a vm makes sense (for something other than gaming the license counts). By default though, we do not enable this option, so your license server should be on a physical machine attached to your local network.

TROUBLE SHOOTING FLOATING LICENSES

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One big consideration when trouble shooting licenses and where to look for problems is whether or not you’ve ever run it before. If you’ve just purchased the software, you want to start at square one, if you’ve been running along fine, then all the sudden it stopped working, that’s a much smaller list of possibles.

 

MY WORKING LICENSE JUST STOPPED WORKING

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  •        Did you make any changes to your firewall configuration, such as blocking ports?

  •        Did you change the name of your license server?

  •        Are you sure your logged in under the same ID as you were when it was working previously?

  •        Have you recently upgraded Shave?

  •        Have you recently moved to a new version of windows?

  •        Is the RLM service running on your server?

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Okay, those are all good questions to check off, but how do I go about diagnosing problems?
There’s a program called ‘rlmstat.exe’ in c:\rlm. This is a diagnostic program for RLM, it can be run either on the server or the client machine. If you want to run it on the client, you can just drag it over and run it there, or you can navigate over to it. You want to run it in a CMD window.

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First run rlm_stat on the server – your output will look something like this :
       

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In the image above, (1) tells you what version of RLM is running, (2) indicates that the service is running  (3)(4)(5) tells you what ports it’s trying to use.

If the service isn’t running, look under task manager->services and see if someone’s shut it off.  If that’s all looking kosher, you want to run rlm_stat on the client. When this is run from the client, a different set of stuff happens. Rlm_stat will try to contact the server. If you were unable to obtain a license from the client via shave, this will probably fail too, but check anyway and verify that it fails.

When rlm attempts to locate the server, it does tries it a few different ways. First it looks in the local c:\rlm folder for a copy of your license, if it finds one, it uses the info about the port and server name to locate the server.

Alternatively, you can also just set the RLM_LICENSE env variable. Go into Settings->system properties->advanced settings->environmen variables, and make sure it’s set correctly – the variable name is case sensitive. Typically, you’d set to 2764@<server name>. Spelling counts! Or, it also tries to find it automatically by broadcasting a ping. You need to be on the same subnet
as the server for this method to just work.

If all that checks out, you want to start thinking about firewalls. Have your system admin check your firewall settings, both a hardware one that might be between server and client, and the windows firewalls and see if any of the 3 ports that were listed in the rlm_stat– all 3 must be open.

If you checked and they are – and it still doesn’t work, are you running multiple versions of RLM on the same server for different software packages? If you are you need to make sure they’re using different ports, a simpler solution to deal with is just host them from different machines.

If you do need to change them, because you really want to run them from the same server, here’s a before and after image where all 3 ports get changed in your rlm license. :
  

Now – some last details, if you’ve recently upgraded shave, we might have upgraded the RLM client that’s embedded in the software, you’ll want to also grab the new version of the server from that download page and install it.

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THE OBVIOUS ISSUES
      

Sometimes the most obvious problems are the ones you don’t bother to check till everything else has been exhausted.
  

1) Are you licensed for this version of shave? The above .lic file indicates (circled) what the maximum version of shave you can run with this license is. 
2) Has your subscription or trial license expired? Check the maximum date 
3) Have you made edits to your rlm file?
4) Did someone swap out the network adapter on your server? (you’d have seen this with rlm_stat)
 

VPN


Yes, you can serve licenses through a VPN host. In this case, you need to have the internet address of the host as its host name. You’ll need to tell us you’re going to do that, and provide that with your key address – in addition to the ‘hostid.txt’ so we can edit that in before encrypting the key.

INTERMITTANT FAILS ON A RENDER FARM


If you’re getting failed frames on the render farm, there are a few possibilities. You need to make sure your machines are set up uniformly the same way. If your logs indicate that a particular machine fails every time (the same machine is usually assigned different frames every time you run, so it may not necessarily be tied to frame number), you need to do the whole checklist above from that client machine with "rlmstat".
If you’re getting occasional fails on different machines, different frames – this is usually because you have more machines than you have licenses, and you were not able to obtain a license. It’s always better to have more licenses than you have machines, so you have a pool to draw from if a license gets stuck somewhere.
You can also set the number of times RLM will retryobtaining a license, by adding TIMEOUTALL 3600 to your license or from RLM web app on http://localhost:5054 > Status > EDIT rlm options .

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You’ll want to do this if you’re running really slim on extra licenses, or you have a super burdened network .

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