Hey Tom
I don't think you quite follow what I am getting at here. People seem to latch onto the Dongle argument and skip over the rest. We're not trying to split up plugin/standalone over two machines.
The main issue is that because Octane slave needs to authenticate ALL the time, constantly, even between renders, if the internet goes down, we can't render. This is a huge problem as our internet here goes down a lot - it's a problem with infrastructure in the whole country. So what we want to see is authentication requirements changed to once a day or every 3 days or once a week would be better. Redshift for example, is just once.
Back to the dongle. We tried the dongle, but it has a flaw they don't tell you about. What we wanted to do was plug in some dongles (we started with one but planned to get more) into slaves, to be able to render on our small farm without interruption, solving the internet problem. As well as that, we have other licenses for standalone/plugin. Now, the problem is that if we want to open C4D (plugin) on one of these machines that has a dongle in it, the dongle license (standalone for slave) is ignored and a web-based (floating) standalone/plugin combo is used. It's not logical. Standalone is a license purchase, plugin is a license purchase. They are not paired, you can have more standalones than plugins. All you need is both on the one machine to run C4D, so standalone SHOULD be able to be in the dongle and plugin should be able to be non-dongle - still a pair, right? But that's not actually how it works. So it takes web licenses - then the dongle license is sitting there, unused, but trapped in a physical dongle, leaving us short a license elsewhere. This is the problem I am trying to describe.
Dongle arguments aside (we returned it), what we need is a solid license system for our small farm that doesn't stop rendering when the internet goes down. That's it in a nutshell. The solution is not dongles as functionality is flawed as described. Therefor solution needs to be just let the authenticated session last at least 24 hours to account for dropouts in internet. I don't think that's too much to ask.