Alexandre Benson Smith wrote:

> msimmons15 wrote:
>> Hi Alexandre,
>>
>> I like the idea of the Mac address. Certainly would be unique!
>>
>> We have "floating licenses" so any users up to the limit could
>> access the software from different clients. Your suggestion about
>> an admin function is good, but our existing clients don't have to do
>> this now and would object to the increased admin. So that's
>> information you didn't have to work with.
>>
>> The basic problem I'm having is:
>> 1. trying to ensure a table record gets deleted when a connection
>> drops (normally or abnormally). I'm finding this to be a tough
>> one... OR
>> 2. Seeing if a connection related to a license usage record still
>> exists. This might be a more workable solution, possibly using
>> Firebird event processing. I haven't worked through this completely
>> yet, but each user could be listening for an event based on a unique
>> ID of their license record (such as MAC Address). If they are
>> signed on, they would post a reply event. No reply event after a
>> reasonable period of time would indicate the license file is not in
>> use and the seat could be reused. This is more complicated than I
>> wanted to get.
>>
>> Thanks for your help!
>>
>> Best,
>> Mike
>>
>>
> Hi Mike,
>
> What about if each client execute an SP on logon, this SP would delete
> all the records from a license table, and post an event. All stations
> should respond to the event inserting a record on the license table,
> this would mean "Yes ! I am listenning and running", the app who logs in
> the last should count the records on the license table, compare with the
> count of available licenses, and decide to login or show a message to
> the user that has no license available at that time.
>
> I think that if you use this approach, you should not care about dead
> connections, since everytime a user wants to login all running
> applications you respond, so you can count easily how much are up.
>

Another method of handling this, is to have a record for each possible
license, when a work station uses a license, it sets a flag with a time,
this could be 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, whatever. Each database
access reads how much time is left on the license and resets it back to
full time, and continues. If a workstation dies, it's license expires,
and can be used by another login.

W