Unknow Device takes licence

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dimitar.staykov
Posts: 7
Joined: Fri Aug 25, 2017 10:35 am

Mon Aug 27, 2018 2:47 pm

1. I would like to report that when device is added to unimus and it is not rekognized it still takes licence. Is there any reason to consider that Unknown devices are managed somehow from Unimus?
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Tomas
Posts: 1206
Joined: Sat Jun 25, 2016 12:33 pm

Thu Aug 30, 2018 11:10 am

There is a few reasons why "unknown" devices take licenses:

1) Devices can go to "unknown" state for many reasons.
For example, you had a fully discovered Cisco in Unimus, and you disconnected it from the network.
Upon first scheduled (or manual) job, it would fail, and would actually go into the "undiscovered" state.
This state is internally the same as a new "unknown" device.
So for licensing purposes Unimus doesn't differenciate between a device that has 100 backups (and you can run diffs, config search, etc.) that has been disconnected and therefore went into "unknown state"; or a new device that has never been discovered in the first place.

2) If undiscovered devices didn't consume a license, we believe it would complicate the licensing model.
Currently the licensing model is very simple - "how many devices you add into Unimus, so many licenses you need".
For new users that never used Unimus, explaining that only "discovered" devices need a license becomes confusing, since they don't know what "discovered" means. Changing this would also take away how predictable the system is in license consumption.
We believe the current way is simple and functional and clear - which we think is a benefit.

3) The licensing server does not collect data from the local Unimus instance (this is due to security reasons - we don't want to send any data from local Unimus to our servers).
Since licensing doesn't know anything about local devices, it doesn't know if they are discovered or not.
A license is simply taken for each device present in the system (whatever the state of the device is).

4) Licensing is internally tied to device addition (before it can even be discovered, licensing server has to approve device addition into the system). Changing this logic to only license devices after they have been discovered would require MASSIVE codebase changes.

All of these points could be solved by a large amount of coding in Unimus of course.
But since changing the current behavior would require MASSIVE time-investment into rewriting the licensing implementation (both client-side and server-side), we don't think it's currently justified.

I think everyone would be more satisfied if we put that development effort into exciting new features and improvements to existing features in Unimus :)
dimitar.staykov
Posts: 7
Joined: Fri Aug 25, 2017 10:35 am

Mon Sep 03, 2018 5:01 am

Hi Tomas,
I understand. And what about if I mark the device as "do not manage"? Will Uninus stull takes the licence? If yes, can you change this logic in licensing?
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Tomas
Posts: 1206
Joined: Sat Jun 25, 2016 12:33 pm

Tue Sep 04, 2018 4:02 pm

Yes, unmanaged devices still take a license.

Here, the "why" is a bit different:
1) Since we have an API, if unmanaged devices did not take licenses, this could easily be abused.
Example:
Buy 10 licenses, and over the API add 10 devices, unmanaged them, and add another 10, unmanage them ... repeat.
This way, you could add even 1000 devices into Unimus using 10 liceses.
Over the API, you could then backup 10 devices, unmanage, manage another 10, backup those, unmanage ... repeat.
Since this is easily scriptable it would open a huge hole in licensing that could be abused.

Of course, I am not saying that this is your objective, but as you can imagine there would be people who would quickly jump at this.

2) Unmanaged devices in Unimus still retain a lot of the functionality that Unimus provides.
You can do diffs (and cross-device diffs) on unmanaged devices.
You have (and can download) all backups of those devices.
Config search still works properly if a device is unmanaged.
Mass Config Push results for unmanaged devices still display properly.
Etc.

So from a functionality / feature stand-point, unmanaged devices still retains quite a few features in Unimus.
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