Daily Archives: August 6, 2010

JALSR: Just another licensing service request

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Phone call from a customer who upgraded to Windows 7 and now gets “no interactive network license”.

  1. Ask whether license manager was reinstalled, and whether the license was installed. Yes.
  2. This is Softimage 2010 on Windows 7, so edit setenv.bat and change _ADSK_LicServers to @127.0.0.1 (Softimage 2011 automatically falls back on 127.0.0.1, so for 2011 I wouldn’t have to bother with this).
  3. Still can’t start Softimage. Disable firewall to quickly test whether ports are being blocked (telnet not installed on Windows 7 by default, so it’s quicker to just disable the firewall temporarily).
  4. Still cannot start, but it doesn’t appear to be a network connectivity issue. So check SoftimageLicense.log: it says “cannot connect to server”. So, server is probably not running.
  5. Start LMTOOLS and do a Perform Status Enquiry. Yup, server not running.
  6. Start Server, click Perform Status Enquiry to double-check
  7. Start Softimage. It works!
  8. Check that Start Server at Power Up is enabled. It’s not. Neither is “Run as Service”. Very strange. The server shouldn’t have started!!! Oh well. Select both check boxes.
  9. All done, except for the paperwork (case notes, final email, …)

ICE: Looping over group members and setting data

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You can get data from the members of a group, and even loop over that data, but you cannot set data on individual group members. I’ve seen this question come up on several forums, mailing lists, and beta lists. You can’t store a reference in an attribute (so you can get it later and plug it into Set Data). You can store a string (eg the object name) in a string, but you cannot convert a string into a reference. And you can’t plug your Get Group into a Set Data.

Things like references and execute ports are part of the pre-evaluation stage. They must be resolved before the ICE tree is evaluated. Everything else in the ICE tree is the stuff that has to be constantly re-evaluated. So driving a reference port with another ICE node doesn’t really fit into the way ICE was designed to work.

For something like (resolving connections), you’re better off using a script to set up your ICE trees.

PS – Looping itself doesn’t seem that hard to figure out.