CompuServe Messages

Paul, There you go, I was trying to stay off this thread, but you said 'mainframe'. I hate dongles. I don't do dongles at home, and I won't (well if I was into video, the Toaster may be a different story). A dongle is a dongle. A license key, to me, is a dongle. In a disaster recovery scenario, when you are trying to get a data center back up and on-line within 24 hours (I'm not talking a few SPARCs here, I'm talking terabytes of data and mulitple mainframes at a location 1000+ miles away) and there a several programs, from several different vendors (IBM doesn't do it, for mainframe stuff, why should anyone else?), all requiring thier seperate license keys (read dongles), keying off the mainframe CPU serial number, and, of course you are running on a different processor in that situation, so all the programs blow with 'licensing' problems (we try to anticipate it in tests, but in a 'real' disaster, you couldn't). You have to call each vendor and hope that you can find someone who is authorized to give you a 'key' over the phone…It can make for one hell of a lot of fun trying to make everything work. Albeit, a license key is far preferable to a hardware dongle, but a dongle is a dongle. Robb