Free a locally installed license by returning it to your license account.

Overview

Returning a license can be done by using the License Administrator (hkey) or sesictrl (non-graphical hkey). Locally installed licenses are tied to your computer name and hardware. If you want to move your licenses to another machine or switch to Login Licensing you must first return your licenses to your SideFX licensing account. They will be placed back into your SideFX licensing account as entitlements which can be installed using another computer.

NOTE:

Login based licensing does not have this limitation as your licenses stay in your SideFX licensing account and are only checked out when Houdini is used and returned when Houdini quits.

Restrictions

• Returning licenses must be initiated by the computer itself.
• Licenses cannot be returned from the website.
• A license may be returned up to 10 times per year.

Returning a license with the License Administrator

1. Start License Administrator.
2. Select the License.
3. Right-click and select "Return License".
4. Enter your email address and the password used for licensing.

As of Houdini 19.0, partial returns are now supported. You may return a subset of licenses from the full quantity.

Returning a license non-graphically with sesictrl

• The sesictrl program is a way to manage licenses without a graphical interface.
• To have access to sesictrl, you will need to setup the Houdini command line environment.

Once you have the Houdini environment setup in your Terminal, use sesictrl to return the license:

1. Type sesictrl login to log into your SideFX license account.
2. sesictrl print-license to get a list of installed licenses (the first column is the License ID).
3. sesictrl return-license LicenseID to initiate the return. The License ID is the numeric ID of the license to be returned.

If you would like to do a partial return, you can add --count to the command line:

sesictrl return-license LicenseID --count arg

Where arg is the number of licenses out of the total to return.

NOTE:
Older versions of sesictrl will not have the --count option and the only way to return a subset of licenses would be to use the graphical License Administrator (hkey).

When you return a license, a disable code is calculated and written to your licenses file on the computer.
The disable code is also recorded and added to your account. The License ID is then invalidated.

For more information about sesictrl, click here.