Virtualization & containers

[John Morrison]

Hi;

Sorry if this is a dumb question.  Is licensecc fit for use under vagrant and podman?  Or other virtualization and container strategies?  Am getting test failures.  There was something mentioned in an issue (#72, currently Open) as these capabilities were works in progress with an ETA of last Spring.  Please advise.

More context, really justifying the question: Am trying to license software built under vagrant with virtualbox provider (so it can be reliably reproduced to run on various Windows/Linux distributions).  This software is also intended to be delivered as podman/docker containers as a swarm/k8s cluster.  

Thanks,

-jm

[John Morrison]

Still looking for guidance here.  Am trying to figure out licensecc's Plan to support (or not) containers & VMs.  Particularly interested in: approach; gating items/problems/bugs/tasks; and/or schedule.  Am willing to pitch in.

I have built and tested licensecc on rootless podman, privileged podman, docker, and vagrant/virtualbox.  These all fail test_os_linux, usually trying to find a labelled disk (etc.), presumably for detecting running under some form of virtualization.  I am confused on a couple points:

• exactly how licensecc wants to "count" licenses per container on a single host (e.g., docker swarm) - a container containing a license server like ktnr's?
• why the "classic" kinds of detection (e.g., existence of ~/.dockerenv, reading of /sys/class/dmi/id/product_uuid for all but rootless podman) are/should not be used to fingerprint the physical underlying host 

Please advise so that any effort I make is aligned with licensecc's goals/plans.

Thanks in advance,

-jm

[Leopold Kuttner]

Gabriele mentioned in an open issue that this is being worken on in the "feature/pc_identifiers branch": https://github.com/open-license-manager/licensecc/issues/72

I guess he  currently just does not have the time to finish it.

My appraoch was for the client to have a license in the form of a text file, where in the license key was generated with the underlying pc hardware identifiers. I guess this is not a good solution for virtualized environments.

I guess what could work (restrict concurrent usage in different virtual environments with the same license key) without requiring to work out a solution for hardware identifiers in virtualized environments, is to set up a *proper* license server on the side of the licensee (with a database of active licenses). The client must periodically check against the server's database to see if the client's license is in use from another IP or something to that effect. The great oatpp library could be of help in this regard: https://oatpp.io/