Stuart McLachlan
stuart at lexacorp.com.pg
Sat May 2 20:38:05 CDT 2009
I'm a firm believer in providing each customer with their own copy of the application which
has an embedded serial number. Encrypt the customers name/address and anything else
you want with this unique key. When the application is opened, decrypt the Customer Name
etc and embed this on all forms and reports. That alone will discourage a great deal of
piracy in a business environment.
If you want to lock the application to a specific installation, it is a a simple process to include
something else in the encryption.
The problem comes in deciding what to use. I dislike using hardware for two reasons:
1. It is the BE that needs to be limited and getting hardware info for the BE server from a FE
workstation is not so easy.
2. Hardware breaks down and needs to be replaced.
One possibility is to lock it to a specific BE \\servername\sharename\BDName and possibly
the Domain name if it is a domain network.
For small operations like Toys For Tots co-ordinators, I'd suspect that in many situations it
will run on a standalone PC or a small peer to peer network, so domain specific stuff is
probably out of the question for the original case - and the workgroup is probably just named
"Workgroup" <g>.
If customers wants to change the installation to run from a different server location, they
will need to contact you, but as long as they keep the servername and share the same, they
can replace any hardware they like.
I'd be interested in the working group. I've got similar things operating now.
I have one application that I didn't charge for up-front - we negotiated a transaction based
licence fee instead. Ever three months, the system pops up a message that the licence
needs renewing, the customer emails me and I send back a new key which is an encrypted
version of their name, the serial number and the new expiry date ( provided that they have
paid the currently fees). On startup, the FE decrypts the user details and stores this in a
static function for display on forms and reports, checks the expiry date and either: does
nothing; warns that the licence is about to expire and then continues; or states that the
licence has expired and closes itself down.
On 2 May 2009 at 8:29, jwcolby wrote:
> I do think this is the ticket for instances where you do not care how many copies run at a given
> site. Make the user contact you for a key. Make them include the "serial number" of the installed
> BE and the name of the company and create a table that holds the name / address of the company and
> keys dispensed. Then if people call in asking for more / new keys, the Serial Number of the BE
> should match the name / address they provide. If the serial number is in your database but the name
> / address is somewhere completely different...
>
> Is anyone interested in forming a working group to define and perhaps even design / build such a
> system that Database Advisors could license to group members?
>
> John W. Colby
> www.ColbyConsulting.com
>
>
> Max Wanadoo wrote:
> > Susan,
> > I would store it in a User Defined Property on the BE and the FE. The UDP
> > would store BE HD Srl No. (Plus anything else you want to create info for,
> > eg Date installed, Company Licensed to, etc, etc).
> >
> > Each time the BE fires up it checks the HD Srl No. Each time the FE fires
> > up it checks the entries on the BE - it also increases the number of logged
> > users by 1 and checks if they have reached the licensed limit. You can also
> > limit the number of installations this way.
> >
> > Make use of the UDP to store and record all sorts of stuff. Limited only by
> > your imagination and your needs.
> >
> > When the BE first fires up, the HDPs won't be there, so you know it is a
> > fresh install. The user never sees these properties and wont know they are
> > there. Use them in conjunction with an encrypted MDE to log events etc.
> >
> >
> >
> > Max
>
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