We have licences for version 11 of Houdini. However, we have some digital assets that are written in Python, and in version 11 there are some Python bugs that are still not fixed yet. So we are trying to install both versions 10 and 11 on the same machine. For version 10, we want to use the apprentice version, and for version 11 we want to use our license. We have tested installation on 2 machines. One with both version installed and another with only Houdini 11 installed.

The one with both versions installed, only version 10 is able to start. Version 11 returned some licensing software error message when started. We tried some of the suggested solutions posted on Houdini forums, but this did not help. The one with only version 11 installed had no problems starting.

It would seem that Houdini 10 is preventing Houdini 11 from starting up somehow. Any thoughts on this.

When starting Houdini 11 on the machine that also has 10 installed, the error message is “Unable to connect to hserver for licence acquistion”.

We discovered that it is because hserver.exe is not running. We have checked that it has been set to start automatically as a service in Control Panel, as suggested by the Houdini troubleshooting guide. But for some reason it is not running.

Even if we double click on the program to run it manually, it crashes within a second. Any suggestions?

Do you have Houdini 11 licensing tools installed? Licensing tools version 10 are not able to read Houdini 11 licenses.
Also, we strongly suggest keeping your non-commercial licenses separated from your commercial ones (as in a different machine). With the licenses installed on the same machine, it is very easy to accidentally turn your commercial files into non-commercial.

Silvina - thanks for the reply

>Do you have Houdini 11 licensing tools installed?

I will check this out.

>we strongly suggest keeping your non-commercial licenses
>separated from your commercial ones

This would be good, but due to the python bugs, we cannot do this at this stage… We need to have both. I am hoping the bugs will be fixed soon…

> With the licenses installed on the same machine, it is very
> easy to accidentally turn your commercial files into
> non-commercial.

hmmm… sounds a bit daunting. Can you let us know what not to do?

>Do you have Houdini 11 licensing tools installed?

We have check - yes it is installed

Also, another thing I forgot to mention is that, for v11, we are using floating licenses on the server - we have 20 licenses. So the v. 10 free apprentice license is on the client computers (inside c:\windows\keys\) and the v. 11 license is actually on the server.

I would have thought that this would mean the two cannot clash, since they are on separate machines. But somehow, we still have problems starting the licensed Houdini 11 if apprentice Houdini 10 is also installed on the same machine.

We have an urgent deadline coming, so any way of solving this would be much appreciated.

If you are still having problems, please write to support@sidefx.com with the diagnostic information from your server machine and from a client machine.