I ended up installing a Ubuntu server distribution within a VirtualBox container and Samba4 to act as a domain controller. I experimented with Windows Server 20 but they were expensive and just way too much for our purpose. This was the first time I had to busy myself with ADDC services.
Fun fact: Our company is too small to even utilize a domain control server and the other had their own. So now we had a network license which could be used within one domain only. Without domain restriction obviously is more expensive. The other one is limited to work within one domain only. What the Eplan customer service did not tell us is that there are two types of network licenses: One that can be used without or across different domains. A simple VPN should do the trick… Should… Should not be a big deal as we had PCs running 24/7 which can be used as license server. They said yes and my boss asked me how we could implement that.
Until that point we did not have a network license. My boss said “Yeah, sure, if you pay for the network license upgrade”. Quite a while ago a company which has a very strong relationship with ours asked us if we could share one of our Eplan licenses with them so they could use it from time to time if we do not need it. Eplan utilizing DCOM services to achieve this. You still will receive a dongle which has to be connected to any PC which later will serve as license server. The solution for this issue is buying a so called network license. This is quite impractical especially if your company has multiple workstations in different places but does not want to invest in more of these quite expensive Eplan licenses. If you want to use Eplan on another PC you have to hand over your dongle. Removing the dongle causing the software to stop working until you either reconnect the dongle or close it. The dongle has to be connected to your computer in order to start the software and keep it running. LicensingĮplan using USB dongles to protect their software from piracy. Just Google for it if you want further information.
Other examples for such an engineering software would be Elcad, AutoCAD Electrical or WSCAD and some more. For this purpose our company utilised Eplan Electrical P8. As some of you might already have guessed I am doing electrical stuff in my employment, including electrical engineering.
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