Autodesk licensing is freakin annoying as I’ve experienced. Was struggling badly today just to install Mudbox Academic version, after about a million failed attempts, I uninstalled Mudbox, and unfortunately, Mudbox decides to uninstall FLEXLM license utility which Maya 2009 uses. So now I’m without a Maya license and have to reinstall! But my DVD/CD drive is broken, so now I have to wait to buy an external drive, and I’m on Winter Break so I want to get as much 3D done as possible.

Why does the licensing have to be so complicated, license files and lmgrd.exe files and log files, and hardware identifiers, and when a tiny thing goes wrong with any of these aspects licensing fails, and since I don’t have a commercial version (I have academic), Autodesk doesn’t offer support!

So now I can’t use Maya until I can fork over $100 bucks for a new external drive, because simply transferring the installation files to a thumb drive won’t cut it.

I would be happy if I knew buying a new drive would fix it, and I could just install but I’m guessing I have some more issues ahead of me. I think I’ll just do a clean uninstall and start things fresh, because I don’t know if just repairing the installation will bring back the FLEXLM service config. So many possibilities, only one that works…

-Austin: Using Maya 2009
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IRC Nick: AustinZ