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quote of the month
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Even if you pay for the Advanced Support add-on and set up âActive Directory â Identity Provider (Entra ID, Okta) â SCIM provisioning of Autodesk users and license assignmentâ, thatâs still nowhere near foolproof, you often get into situations where the initial license assignment fails and you have to wait 30-40 minutes until the next cycle before it gets assigned, or it still somehow never works until you jiggle the handle often enough to âget the pipes unstuckâ.
In an environment where you must filter outbound Internet connectivity (most facilities these days), the list of URLs you need to approve for named used licensing is difficult to manage, and tends to change without notice over time. The documented list is typically incomplete / out of date, so you spend a bunch of time digging through firewall logs when things start to mysteriously fail because a new version of Named User licensing wants to connect to new URLs. And some of the required services are hostile to FQDN firewall policies, for instance returning different IPs over time for the same FQDNs.
None of these problems existed with AdLM floating licenses, and even less so when Flame was just old school, unmodified FlexLM (I remember when the introduction of the âdlhostidâ was our biggest gripe!).
The best licensing option for M&E, bar none, is a simple, unmodified RLM server you manage yourself, running in a VM / container.
Teradici / HP Anyware has a pretty nice solution: they run âFlexLM in the cloudâ (aka âFlexNet Operationsâ), with the option to deploy your own local FlexLM server, and more or less freely transfer licenses between the cloud service and a local server if you need to support hosts which cannot have any kind of Internet connectivity. Itâs not as nice as ârawâ RLM/FlexLM, you still have to deal with some nonsense like a rental Flame workstation having been previously registered to another facility and needing the hardware ID to be reset by HP support before you can license it, but overall it works pretty smoothly.
The collective cost of non value creating âmake workâ / wasted time / opportunity cost on both the Autodesk and end user side is staggering. So is the loss of goodwill / perception of a low quality product (having nothing to do with the capabilities of the software itself) / needless production emergencies when you canât get Flame to start. Producers hate uncertainty and schedule risk, if they feel they canât trust an application / workflow, they will find other ways.
I also believe that this licensing system is a mandate from the mothership which does not take into consideration the needs of the typical M&E rapidly changing freelancer workforce, insane / 24/7 schedules, evolving requirements⌠I donât imagine the folks at 10 Duke are any more enamored with the system than we are.
I charge for systems work by the hour, so I shouldnât complainâŚ
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well said
It is nice to see I am not the only one with this issue. I admin three flames and the constant logging in to authorize the software is such a pain in the ass. I contacted support and their recommendation was to reinstall the software. I laughed at this suggestion with the fact that I had just done a fresh install of the Mac OS and 2026 was installed and configured during a service call with Autodesk a week previously. The flame was running great except this stupid constant login to use your software you paid for issue.
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same , 5 flames here.
This system is unobtainable from a business standpoint, it makes the software way more expensive if it needs constant admin babysitting.
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We have 10 total licenses. Managing them is a total pain in the arse. We still have old float licenses we had to stop using because we cannot upgrade them to new Flames. It took 2 weeks talking to support to establish that.
Not only licensing, support also is not great. Iâm often talking to Foundry and Baselight support and somehow I get things done. With Autodesk? Almost impossible to resolve issues.
Licesing is a pain. It would be so nice to go back to floating licensing. Keep it as saas, just give me a license that is dynamically assigned and can work with a closed system.
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I hadnât thought about this for a while (due to futility and denial), but thought Iâd share this experience since itâs germane to the threadâŚ.
On the last case I opened with support about this license issue, the support guy and I had a pleasant back-and-forth. He asked for subscription IDs and user emails, I sent them over, he pretended to read them (sorry support guy, that is probably an unfair assumption) and then responded with one of the most epic dodges Iâve seen from a support channel:
In that case, you will have to post the issue in a forum related to Flame.
I will help you with the link below, please post you issue there in detail and the team will assist you further.
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/flame-forum/bd-p/flame-forum-en
I hope that should answer your concern.
As the query is addressed from our end, I will wait for your response and procced to close this case, but if we can help you with anything else, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Thank you and have a great day.
I can just picture him dusting his hands off, basking in the self satisfaction of a job well done. I thanked him for taking the time to cut and paste a link for me. Itâs really nice to know there are still over achievers out there.
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youâre assuming that support guy was a humanâŚ
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He said his name was Abraham Lincoln. Thatâs real right?
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I just followed the link and came accross an answer by @YannLaforest
I might just frequent that forum, too, if heâs actively participating. Heâs such a great community person.
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if anyones curious , just for fun i tried to just put a ticket in begging for floating licenses.
âI confirmed that Autodesk has discontinued the sale of floating licenses. Unfortunately, it is not possible to convert a single-user license to a floating license. Customers who wish to use Autodesk products must opt for subscription-based licensing models.
What was the last perpetual flame version?
2022?
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id buy a perpetual 2022. anyone wants to sell me one lol.
For a time during the transition the Named User License sysem (NUL⌠how apropos) would allow a license to function disconnected from the internet for 30 days. They seem to have removed that unless anyone has seen otherwise?
During that time these problems were mostly masked by this 30 day buffer.
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I have worked at places where all
of this would just instantely disqualify any autodesk software from ever beign deployed.
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I get that sense that Flame is shifting to a âdude in his undies on an iMac in his bedroomâ market segment, and less of the facility deployments from the past. Of course there are still some holdout places, me included.
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There are two separate issues:
-
Is Named User Licensing an appropriate workflow on how our more fluid work environments look like?
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Is the their current implementation of NUL (love this name) actually good?
Iâm not the best to judge the first question. Just going by what Finn describes, and the fluidity of todayâs flexible headcount where freelancers get added/removed constantly to deal with variable demand, one can see how it falls short.
Do I think a named user implementation can be solid, cover all the corner cases, work reliably in all kinds of network and OS conditions, deal with air gap, shitty WiFi, people moving between locations, hybrid OS of Linux, Mac, Windows?
Yes. Itâs a non-trivial engineering problem. But with a proper use case description and requirements analysis, top tier engineers on the case, and sufficient funding/resourcing that is absolutely something that can be built without causing the type of user frustration weâre seeing.
And it should be coupled with âinnocent until proven guiltyâ mentality, not the other way around.
The one example I fall back on when I say that this can be engineered, is something I was personally part of. You probably all know plenty examples where a company announces a multi-hour planned downtime on a weekend because of âserver upgradesâ. That my friends is lazy engineering.
When Amazon had to move the entire server fleet and database than ran all European retail websites (amazon.de, amazon.uk, and amazon.fr) from their Virginia data centers where they originally were hosted from, to a new data center in Ireland, the website was never down. There was a brief 10 minute period around midnight where you could still browse the website, but not check-out, which was properly messaged on the site.
That required an entire data center rebuild, the migration of some of at the times Oracleâs biggest databases while being live. And nobody missed a beat. It was a 6 months project, it required some bright minds, and a dedication to customer experience.
So donât tell me that reliable and properly functioning named user licensing cannot be built if there is a will. This is pure and simple resource greed and management failure.
Now, if the requirements are such that named user licensing isnât actually the right answer in todayâs fluid environment, thatâs a different question, with available answers if management is in fact interested.
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While a fair observation of the market, I think itâs disrespectful of the people in question.
Iâm not a facility. I have a single Flame license. I do work for big name brands and have my list of credits. Iâm properly dressed when I work, I have multiple workstations, including HP and Dell and which are certified configs, I have all the other infrastructure that is appropriate, and my clients are happy and pay market rates on time, with invoices from a properly registered and tax paying business.
And I can give you a list of well respected members of this community that fit that exact set of parameters.
Todayâs market is different. Facilities are no longer the only option. There is a broader range that can co-exist. And it doesnât mean the rest of us is trailer trash.
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I am a facility , I have many flames and artists to manage and i am not properly dressed and nobody can tell me that I cant sit here in my undies on my iMac at home 
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