Happy new year, everyone.

I've installed Houdini on one of our network shares, and I'd like our users to be able to run it directly off the server. I've got it working, but there's one snag. hserver.exe needs to be running as a service on the local machine for it to work.

Ideally, I'd like to NOT have hserver running as a service and instead run it on demand, only when houdini is running. When I try running hserver directly from the commandline, it just prints some help text and then exits.

Is there any way to keep hserver from immediately exiting when it's not running as a service? Having to install and register hserver as a service on every machine isn't that hard (psexec FTW), but it just doesn't feel clean, y'know?

Also, is there a way to specify the license server in a file? Right now it looks like it's getting saved in the registry, but it'd be nice if I could just edit a file in our network install and be done with it for our facility.

We're running Win 7 x64.

Thanks!
Chad von Nau

OK, so I got hserver to install using a .bat script. First make a file called houdini-lic-server.reg. Replace <license_server> with your license server hostname:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00


“LicenseServer”=“<license_server>”
Next, make a file called houdini-client-install.bat:
@echo off
net stop HoudiniServer
xcopy /y “%~dp0hserver.exe” %windir%\system32
xcopy /y “%~dp0hserver.ini” %windir%\system32
reg import “%~dp0houdini-lic-server.reg”
sc delete HoudiniServer
sc create HoudiniServer binPath= %windir%\system32\hserver.exe start= auto
sc start HoudiniServer
ECHO:
CLS
ECHO Houdini license client installed.
CHOICE /T 1 /D N > NUL

Put hserver.exe, hserver.ini, and houdini-lic-server.reg in the same folder as the .bat, and run as an administrator. This script will remove any existing hserver instances before installing the new one.

This can be run across the whole domain w/ PSExec. Replace the relevant variables.
psexec \\* -u <domain_admin> -p <password> \\<server>\<share>\houdini-client-install.bat
This can also be done on one machine and imaged to other machines successfully.

Once this is setup on a machine, you'll be able to run houdini from a network share. I'm having some issues with digital assets, but otherwise, it's working.