Licensing and Hardware Protection in QuickField Professional

Licensing in QuickField

To be able to run professional version of QuickField you must purchase a QuickField license.

QuickField licenses can be restrictive. They can restrict usage of QuickField specifying the subset of granted features and/or license expiration date. Currently, any feature is related to a class of specific physical problems (for example, Electrostatics, Heat Transfer Analysis, etc.). The license granting such feature grants you the right to solve the problems of this kind with QuickField.

Whenever you purchase a new license, you get a hardware key protecting your QuickField software from unsolicited copying, and the password linked to it. We encode the data describing the purchased license into this hardware key and into unique password linked to it.

If your license does not grant you the full set of QuickField features, you can always extend your license purchasing additional license features. Similarly, you can prolong a temporary license. Since in these cases you do not purchase a new license, you retain the same hardware key. At the same time, we provide you with another password that reflects the new subset of granted QuickField features and/or the new expiration date of the license. After that you will only have to replace the old password with the new one.

When you run QuickField for the first time it requests for the password to be entered. Make sure that your hardware key is available at that moment, otherwise QuickField does not accept the password.

To make your hardware key available, begin with attaching it either to a parallel or to an USB port depending on the key type. After that, availability of your hardware key depends on the kind of QuickField license you have purchased. We provide two kinds of licenses: Single and Multiple.

Single license grants you the right to run QuickField on single computer at a time. The hardware key provided with such license will always be available for QuickField sessions on the computer the key is attached to. Regardless of the number of sessions started on this computer, neither of them will access another hardware key. On the other hand, this key will never be available for QuickField sessions started on other computers.

Multiple license grants you the right to start QuickField sessions on several computers in your local network simultaneously, limiting the number of sessions started at any given moment of time. This limit is encoded in the hardware key provided with the license. Attaching several of such hardware keys to computers of the same network, you increase the granted total number of sessions on that network.

Accessing a Multiple license hardware key from other computers on the network requires to install the corresponding Security Server software on the computer the key is attached to.

License Types and Hardware Protection Keys in QuickField

Hardware protection key is a small electronic device that contains vital confidential information about the QuickField license you have purchased. Depending on its type, the key should be attached either to a parallel, or to a USB port.

The key shipped with a Single license should be attached to the workstation where you will run QuickField. The key shipped with a Multiple license can be attached to any computer on the same network with the workstations where you will run QuickField.

QuickField supports the following types of hardware keys provided by SafeNet Inc.:

Sentinel SuperPro hardware keys exist for both parallel and USB ports. You need to install Sentinel SuperPro Security Server software for Multiple licenses.

We ship new licenses for QuickField only with Sentinel SuperPro keys.

Attention: for 64 bit platforms (Windows XP x64 and Windows 2003 Server x64) the only supported key is USB-type of SuperPro.

Hardware Protection Keys and Security Servers in QuickField

Security Server is a software application that keeps track of licenses granted to QuickField sessions. Any instance of Security Server mediates between hardware protection keys attached to its computer and workstations running QuickField on the same network.

On Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista computers, you can install any server as service. In this case, the installed server will be started automatically at boot time and kept running even when no user is logged in.

For security server removal, installing or adjustment you may use the program \Common Files\SafeNet Sentinel\Sentinel Protection Server\loadserv.exe.

To start the security server manually:

To stop the protection server you may:

Sentinel License Monitor may be used to check the protection server and protection keys statuses. Shortcut for this program is installed to menu \Programs\Tera Analysis\QuickField 5.5\Tools. However, instead of this you always could point your browser to the address and port of the computer where the protection server is running:

http://IP-address (or computer name):number of the port in use

for example,

http://192.168.1.1:6002

For more details about using these programs please, refer to the original documentation SafeNet. If you have the QuickField Professional installation CD, you may find this documentation in the folder /Sentinel/SysAdminHelp. Alternatively you may find it at SafeNet Inc. website or contact your QuickField distributor for help.

If you cannot resolve the problems related to the electronic protection keys by yourself our QuickField Support Team is always ready to help you..

Additional software

QuickField installation CD has additional software for resolving the problems related to the electronic copy protection keys.