Has anyone else with an RFSDK based application experienced occasional "lock ups" when you application starts or even while it's running?
We noticed this occasionally on one of our servers and couldn't figure out what was going on. The CPU was not heavily loaded, and our logging didn't report any excessive delays in database access.
We eventually tracked the problem do the point in the code where the RFSDK checks for the presence of a hardware security key and verifies the licensing.
We closed our app down and ran the "C:\RFSDK\DetectKey.exe" progam and NOTHING happened. I.e. instead of popping up a window reporting the number of licenses found or popping up a window reporting "No key found" the DetectKey.exe process just sat in the task list with no visible window for approx. 2 minutes.
Eventually, the windows appears and it reports "No key found!" even though the key is attached and it was working fine earlier in the day. We assumed the RFSDK app was locking up for the same reason as DetectKey.exe.
A reboot of the machine usually fixes the problem. However, once it did NOT fix the problem even after several reboots, so we tested just attaching a local printer to see if the parallel port had failed.
The printer would not print so we assumed a dead parallel port. The client then got a technician in to look at the machine, the technician "changed some settings in the BIOS" and magically the printer started working again and DetectKey.exe also starting functioning as normal.
Several time since then we've seen the lock up problem and had to reboot the machine. I would normally assume the parallel port is flakey (or possibly the hardware key) and advise the client to get a new machine immediately - however, we have seen similar behaviour on another machine as well which has it's own hardware key. It may be unrelated, but I often see the problem on the other machine after connecting via Remote Desktop and running the RFSDK application. A reboot is required to resolve it.
I'm starting to suspect a conflicting piece of software or some sort of driver problem.
If people have found the USB keys to be a bit more reliable - perhaps we should just switch to these. What's involved in switching keys but retaining all our licensing etc?
Cheers,
Michael
