License Server closing itself?

[Dippndots]

We have the license server running on our domain controller and at some point this morning it looked like it closed itself because all of a sudden our renders were blank. This happened once before a few weeks ago and we just thought someone accidentally closed it, however this morning this definitely wasn't the case.

Just wondering if anyone had come across this? Is there a setting hidden in the license server I'm unaware of?

[maru]

Hi, do you mean licensing server or distributed rendering server?

[naikku]

Well. I kind of had the same just last night. I opened vnc to my work comp and decided to compile an animation for one client.
It was 01.00am saturday-sunday night and I was thinking I´ll leave Premiere to export it so I don't have to wait for that monday morning.
It seemed that at somepoint all my nodes had started to render pure black frames. I opened 3dsmax and sent the black frames to be rendered
again. I saw backburner monitor only gave errors (error initializing renderer) and 3dsmax kept restarting on all the nodes.
I didnt have any clue what was going on and I tried with different scenes. BB monitor showed errors again on all nodes.
Then I tried DR and then I saw a license-error on the Errors-window. I vnc´d my nodes and there on the DR servers it said they cant get a lic.
(~2.45am, tired as a goat)
I vnc´d our license manager and from there I saw Windows 8 had updated and restarted and the comp was in the ... I dont know what... the Win 8-screen
where you can start your programs. Anyway I opened desktop and then opened the license manager and, finally, my render nodes started to render again.

Could the magic-man, Ondra, code some line of code for some "Corona task listener", this could be installed when Corona is installed and it would listen
and receive messages on the workstation computer. Now the Corona errors-window opens only inside 3dsmax. And as my workstation connects to the internet,
it got the license and didnt read it from the lic server = no problems and/or errors when rendering with it.
What I didnt like from lastnight was that backburner only gave me "error initializing renderer". Would have been nice if some small task would have
notified me eg. "5 nodes keep restarting 3ds max - is there a problem with the lic manager?" (nodes dont connect to the internets)

[Frood]

Some notes about this:

- Windows updates should alway be disabled on all boxes taking part in production - renderslaves inlcuded (automatic download may be ok, automatic install: nogo)

- Crucial services like license manager(s) should run on a server-like computer or a dedicated server to assure availability 24/7. The one and only professional way to run a license manager on windows is to run it as windows service. I hope at least this will come officially supported for Corona LM in near future. This way even your windows-updating, rebooting box would have run the license manager again after restart (I run Corona LM as a service with the help of an external utility for those and other reasons)

-  As for "Corona taks listener": Logfiles are not a geek-toy but give you almost every important information you want. Since there is still no reasonable command line tail implementation on Windows (and I tried them all, including a self written powershell version), I changed to a convenient graphical version named snaketail. You can watch all progress on your nodes in realtime this way.

Good Luck!