The use of LightBurn in a shared computer lab has been an extremely frustrating experience for our organization due to the license management system. Though I haven’t yet solved all of the issues, I have made some observations and discoveries that may be useful to other users in the same position, so I thought I’d compile my notes here.
First, our environment is one with 10 lab computers not connected to lasers, and 3 computers each connected to different lasers. All computers run Debian Linux, all are networked together and to the internet, and we have about 250 users that are managed by an LDAP server. We purchased 10 floating licenses with the expectation that the Lightburn software could run 10 total simultaneous instances at any time on any of these 13 computers.
The general problem that has haunted us for years is that users are prompted to re-enter the license key almost every time they launch LightBurn. The key is always accepted, but it’s as if it’s never saved, and always has to be re-entered.
What has helped most is generating an *.ldata file by following the instructions here: Licensing Setup - Configuring different license options . The idea is to create an .ldata file using your floating license key, then copy that file into /etc of each computer intended to run LightBurn.
This does help somewhat, and I’ve described the effect with some detail here: Lightburn keeps asking for floating licence key . But it is still the case that there appears to be something in the userspace cache that LightBurn is checking on in relation to the license. I say this because if user-A logs into computer-A which has the appropriate ldata file, LightBurn will launch without prompting for the key. But if user-A now logs into computer-B, LightBurn prompts for the key. After entering the key with success, closing and reopening LightBurn, there isn’t a prompt anymore. Now if user-A logs back into computer-A, LightBurn will prompt for the key again. This tells me that it’s not only the machine that’s being checked against the key but also the user and something about the user’s history of having been on a different computer the last time LightBurn was run.
This problem also means that if one user wants to operate three lasers at once, they will have to enter the license key three times.
I’m still working to figure out what file other than the *.ldata file LightBurn is looking at for license authentication. If I make any more progress, I’ll post it here.
I’d suggest you speak with Lightburn support and see if they can help you streamline this or come up with a more realistic way for your students to do this.
Can you install Lightburn as a system application, so it’s user independent?
I have discussed this with LB support, and they don’t seem to have any more insights after this. I get the impression that our use case is too rare to garner more attention.
LightBurn is being run as a system installed application directly from the computer logged into, and we have also tried running it from a server at each of the 13 workstations. Both methods seem to produce the same result. It seems like LB looks at the /etc directory of the computer on which the process is being executed.
Neither of these approaches make LB user independent though. That would require that everyone log in as the same, local, non-LDAP user, which would defeat the value of our network for everything else we do. Running LB as a system application when logged in as a user is still going to pull preferences from /home/username/.config/LightBurn/ at the very least. As I said in the original post, it seems like it’s looking for more, and I currently suspect it’s something in ~/.cache/
I’ve also encountered a similar problem, having to enter the license key everytime we load lightburn up with a new user. Would be amazing if this could get sorted as will make everything easier
I took a quick look at the support Desk. The support ticket associated with the Original Post was Closed. A 10-seat hosted-floating license was issued as a remedy with a request to test and let us know.
I saw your closed support ticket as well.
Did you reach out to Dominic?
We managed to solve the purchasing problem from the previous ticket so that’s fine. It’s just the floating license issue when we try to use Lightburn after logging in.
The way the license system is supposed to work, nothing about the user is used when generating the fingerprint for the machine. The software generates a machine fingerprint, submits it to the server which checks to see if any users on that key have the same fingerprint. If they do, it shouldn’t consume a seat, because licensing is per-computer.
In your “user-A / computer-B” scenario above, do both of the computers have the ldata file in the LightBurn folder?
