Sublime Forum

Use in Lab with NFS and LDAP?

#1

Hi,

I’m a lab admin for a college CS lab. I’m considering the possibility of setting up sublime on the lab computers, but am concerned about the license issues. I’m not concerned about purchasing licenses, but rather how to set it up: the lab uses network file systems and LDAP for user authentication, so all the computers have the /home folder as a network drive, and each user can login to any machine and use it as if it’s any other machine.

First: I’ve been testing with my personal license key (probably shouldn’t, I know, but I can’t really just go and buy a new license if it might not work), and I’m getting the feeling that the license file is attached to the machine somehow. Say I enter my license on machine A, which generates a license file. I then sign in to another machine B, open sublime (which should be virtually the same as on machine A since NFS), and now that registration is invalid. Entering my key on B fixes the issue, but it makes the license on A invalid now.

Does there seem to be any way to legitimately handle this? Is the educational lab license done in a different way from a personal license to deal with situations like this? I’d rather not go to my boss and say ‘Nah let’s get the intro students to learn to use vim’.

Second: some what unrelated, but given the same LDAP+NFS setup in the lab as mentioned above, is there a way to setup sublime on each machine ONCE and have the setup available to all users as a default, meaning users inherit it from perhaps the admin, but are free to modify their own packages and settings without changing those of other users? I think currently the best way I have is to set it up once, then have a script to copy the .config/sublime-text-3 folder to each user and chown it to the user, which is rather un-pretty.

Thanks!:slightly_smiling:

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Installing License for Educational Lab Model
Inject License (Linux & OSX)
#2

You should send an e-mail to sales@sublimetext.com.

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#3

Yes, your license is merged with some of your system hardware info to reduce the risk of accidentally leaking your license file. You can circumvent that by storing your license directly in the license file’s location instead of entering it from within Sublime Text.

Regarding your second question you should probably mail sales@… as @Jackeroo proposed.

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Licensing across multiple Linux hosts
#4

That’s really helpful, thanks!

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#5

After contacting sales@sublimetext.com, let us know what solution is when you find it.

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#6

Of course!
I asked 3 days ago… still waiting.

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#7

I’m a little confused.

You mentioned that you’ve purchased a personal license of ST? ( 2 or 3 ) and it’s not working ( registration is invalid ) when you install it on multiple systems and try to use it.

When you say sign in ( are you remotely logging into the other system and displaying “redirecting” screen / app “ST3” back ) or are you logging into each system at the console?

I have ST3 and purchased the personal license.

The personal license allows one user to install ST3 on as many systems as they like so long as they are the only user using it.

I have ST3 installed on my laptop running Win 10 and also installed on two instances of VMware running Win 10 and Ubuntu 14.04, all using the same license. Additionally, I had instance of ST3 installed at work on desktop running Win 7 using same license. I can log into any of the four instances and use ST3 without any issues. The only gotcha is I don’t have access to the same code files as I’m not using a shared “data” folder.

https://www.sublimetext.com/sales_faq

Multiple Operating Systems or Computers
Licenses are per-user, so you’re welcome to use the one license on all computers and operating systems where you are the primary user. For businesses, the number of users must equal the number of licenses.

Using a Personal License at Work
As licenses are per-user, you’re welcome to use your license key on all computers where you are the primary user, including at work.

There is an Educational license which may be solution for what you are trying to do:

Educational Institutions
If you would like to purchase Sublime Text for use in a computer lab, it is not necessary to have the number of licenses equal to the number of students. You may purchase the lesser of either: 1) the number of computers that will have Sublime Text installed or 2) the number of students who will be using Sublime Text.

In the interim while you are waiting for sales@sublimetext.com to reply, try following:

I’m assuming that all systems in lab are *nix since you mention NFS and not CIFS or Samba…

I’m also assuming you’re logging into each system Window system / manager and not command line.

####1
Install ST3 on several ( 2 or more ) systems in your lab and install your personal license on each. Make sure ST3 is installed in the same location ( path ) on each system and has same permissions and same license.

####2
Make sure path in your configuration file ( .bashrc, etc… ) includes path to ST3.

####3
a. Go to console of first system.
b. Login in
c. Should be in window system, not command line.
d. Start ST3
e. It should come of without any issues because you’re using local copy of ST3
f. you can optionally exit ST3 and log out of each system or stay logged in.
g. repeat steps a - f for each system
h. exit ST3 then log out of sysem

####4
a. If you have problems with ST3 registration, then something else is cause.
b. Make sure you have purchased a personal license.
c. Let me know what version of ST you are running.
d. Maybe ST2 had different licensing policy.

####5
If you are able to start ST3 without incident above, then if you save data / code to location in your /home, then you’re personal data files should be accessible between systems.

####6
While it would be a violation of Sublime Text License, any user should be able to log in and start ST3 using procedure / steps listed above.

Lets assume:
a. that ST3 is being used by a group of students for a given class.
b. once the class is over, the students no longer have access to ST3.
c. there are X students in the class, so there are X personal licenses.
d. X = number of Students and Licenses. 1 License per Student

e. You can install X instances of ST3 in separate folders on each system.
/usr/bin/st3-01
/usr/bin/st3-02
.
.
/usr/bin/st3-0n

Using " Automount " you can have the correct instance of ST3 be mounted to the path where ST3 is specified PATH variable.

So when student01 logs into a system.
a. they get their home directory mounted
b. they get /usr/bin/st3-01 mounted to path that points to ST3 location ( ./usr/bin/st3-01 )
c. when they start ST3, it’ll search through paths and run /usr/bin/st3-01

Same for student-02, -03… -0N

When the course is over and a new course begins, the same instances ( locations & licenses ) of ST3 can be used again by the new class

Just change passwords and reassign user names student-01…0N to the new students.

Hope above makes sense…

I suspect the Educational License may be easier to implement, but I’ll let sales@sublimetext.com explain that to you or point you to docs and you can share that with us.

I suspect if you had 5 students, but 20 systems, you can purchase just five licenses, yet install ST3 on all 20 systems and each student will have access to ST3…

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#8

Hi sgst3,

So the first part of my question is resolved. It’s just that entering the license through sublime will generate a machine-dependent file, which means it will only work on one machine, but due to NFS, the license file is ‘on’ every machine. The way to deal with it was to just put the license in a plaintext file and save it. Boom.

For per-machine license we probably will just do a bit of symlinking: The license file in each student’s .config/sublime-text-3 would need to point to a local folder with the machine dependent license file. We have about 50 - 100 students using the lab, but 12 machines.

The second part is what I’m more interested in, but I think a dirty script should do the job.

Thanks for the suggestion!

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#9

:slightly_smiling:

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#10

You should only need 12 licenses based on the following:

Educational Institutions
If you would like to purchase Sublime Text for use in a computer lab, it is not necessary to have the number of licenses equal to the number of students. You may purchase the lesser of either: 1) the number of computers that will have Sublime Text installed or 2) the number of students who will be using Sublime Text.

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#11

Update from sales:

There is no way to set up Sublime across multiple devices in a single go straight out of the box.

However, there are a couple of workarounds that exist outside of Sublime Text; one popular option is to sync via Dropbox, or to use a plugin for syncing. I have included a couple links related to these options below:

http://adamdehaven.com/blog/2015/07/how-to-sync-sublime-text-packages-and-settings-across-multiple-computers-with-dropbox/
https://github.com/csch0/SublimeText-Package-Syncing
https://packagecontrol.io/docs/syncing
http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/portable_license_keys.html

If these solutions don’t fit yor needs, I would suggest you join our technical support forum to chat with our developers and volunteer forum monitors there regarding any other workarounds that are available for syncing: www.sublimetext.com/forum

Honestly though, this is nothing new. I appreciate the answer nonetheless, and – may – continue to find a means.

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