Automated re-activation of LabVIEW when deploying an image?

[wmyers]

I support ~180 systems that have the labview software on them which we need to routinely re-image. We are currently having to log in to each system by hand in order to re-activate the application.

I've looked over the following document and haven't had any success automating it http://zone.ni.com/reference/en-XX/help/371136G-01/nilm/html/automating/ 

I'm looking into the option of eventually having a license server in place but that'll be atleast half a year off.

[wiebe@CARYA]

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@wmyers wrote:

I've looked over the following document and haven't had any success automating it http://zone.ni.com/reference/en-XX/help/371136G-01/nilm/html/automating/ 

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That link is broken: http://zone.ni.com/reference/en-XX/help/371136G-01/nilm/html/automating/

Cold you elaborate what you've tried, and why it doesn't work?

[Bob_Schor]

Can't read the reference -- NI returns large "PAGE ERROR".  

Bob Schor

[wmyers]

I have tried to run the nilmutil to activate the software. The tool exits without any error message but the software still asks for a username/password upon launch.

Some stuff has been censored from the command.

 nilmUtil.exe -s -activate "LabVIEW_Student_PKG_160000" -serialnumber "M2*******" [-firstname "****"] [-lastname "*****"] [-organizationname "Portland Community College"]

[Bob_Schor]

Hmm -- this sounds like how LabVIEW has been installing for years.  There are two times that I recall being asked for Username and Password.  The first is when Setup starts -- it asks for a License, then wants to "phone home" to a User Account to validate (I presume) the License #, after which installation starts.

Once installation finishes and you reboot, when you first run LabVIEW, it (again) asks you to "Activate" it.  I'm guessing the Tool is designed to allow you to "auto-install" (the first step, the one that takes all the time), but doesn't do the actual Activation.  If I had a choice to automate one of Installation or Activation, I'd choose Installation ...

Bob Schor

[wmyers]

In this particular case I need to create a system image and deploy it to ~100 machines in computer labs. I'm having to visit each machine, launch the application and enter my username/password which is incredibly time consuming.

[RavensFan]

AutoIT ??

[wmyers]

That's what I'm thinking of as a fallback although I really don't like baking credentials into anything like that. I'm just hoping there is a first party mechanism for this built into the product.

[Kyle97330]

For what it's worth, where I work we do have a license server and even then when we image a machine it needs to be activated online again.  It seems that the "Computer ID" that your activation is based on has something to do with machine-unique identifiers in some way that change even on PCs with apparently identical internal hardware.  Based off of the serial numbers of one or more pieces of hardware maybe?

Or at least this happened on the last 4 PCs we created based off of one imaged PC.

[wmyers]

Is there a way to automate/bypass the online activation such as passing the username and password to the NI licensing utility?