Hey all.. I can't seem to find what's wrong with my apprentice installation. I've also tried reinstalling, but when I fire up apprentice and try to install a license it says: Error: invalid machine name. Also when I run the license administrator it says: “cannot connect to the license server on ___”

any ideas?

Hi Steven,

could it be, your machine name has special characters ?
During installation did you choose “Apprentice Licencing”, or licence server ?
If you choose licence server, have a look under services with “mmc.exe” (The management console… Of course, only if you are using Windows… Which I guess you do… ) There should be two services running sesinetd.exe and hserver.exe.

But my best guess is you have at least one strange character in your machines name…

HTH

Hey WhoDjini, Steven,

I am having the same issue Steven had, and my machine name is (Mike-PC).
I renamed my laptop many times, uninstalled, reinstalled, deleted (keys) folder, searched the forums, tired everything I found with no success.

If anyone can help me I will be very thankful.

Kind Regards
Nikos

I got the same error message trying to install on Ubuntu, even though my computer name only contained plain characters.

I had tried not to install anything other than the essentials, meaning I omitted the Houdini License Server when I got this error.

I had to uninstall and then reinstall, making sure to get the Houdini License Server this time as well, and after that Houdini was able to start up without errors.

Apparently, we can also manually get license keys at

http//license.sidefx.com/get_nc_license.php

but for that we need to have a server name and a server code.