Cannot Find Zoo Server After IP Address Change

No longer supported

Zoo 4.0 was the license manager for Rhino 4, which reached end of life long ago. This article is kept for historical reference. For current LAN Zoo licensing, see the LAN Zoo guide.

Question

We needed to change IP addresses and subnet masks of systems on our network. After doing this, our Rhino workstations could no longer get licenses from our Zoo server.

I have checked the Zoo log files, and it appears that the Rhino client requests are heard by the Zoo. But the Zoo’s replies are not received by Rhino.

I am not sure why this affects the software. Any clues?

Answer

If all you’ve done is change IP address and subnet masks, then most likely the problem has to do with NetBIOS name resolution. Rhino and the Zoo communicate via NetBIOS Mailslots. Thus, NetBIOS name resolution must work from both the Rhino workstation and the Zoo. Whether the computers can ping each other doesn’t matter, because Ping does not use NetBIOS. The Nbtstat utility is a good tool for testing NetBIOS name resolution.

Note

The customer later reported that there were some old entries on his WINS server that were not tombstoned or scavenged. After removing these entries, he ran nbtstat -R on both the Rhino workstations and the Zoo server, and Rhino was again able to get licenses from the Zoo.