POLL: Would a change to only USB dongles worry you

Hi Ashleigh,

Had a quick chat with a couple of our engineers here. We will be running C-Gate in single board computers SBC (Advantech etc) for our commercial projects. You can order these in all sorts of configs. Just had one turn up today for a project (C-Gate will be going into this one) The one we happened to get today is new model and has two prarallel ports and several serial 232/484 ports etc. This unit has one USB port. The one thing that was mentioned is the vulnerability of a usb dongle either being bumped or taken under the misconception it might be a usb memory stick. Most people ignore parallel dongles these days, plus they screw in, which means a casual extraction is not as likely.

Obviously we would like both but not tooooo fussed either way.

Pitty software licence is not in your options list for this poll

PS. "The poll options are a bit leading your worship"
sustained !

 

I work for a company that protects it's software using USB dongles (HASP).

The only comments I have is thay can be prone to snapping off if used on a laptop for example, and they do tend to get knocked off as people think they are USB HDD keys.

I don't have an opinion either way, (except dont use dongles at all) but that is what we have found.

Cheers

Rohan

 

USB Dongles would be great

Just a comment from NZ on this, we would really like a USB dongle option, as the PC's we use for things such as running Schedule Plus don't have the old parallel printer ports on them.

Just a thought for anyone concerned about security of the USB dongles, you could put the dongle inside the PC case, either with a USB extension lead routed outside the case and plugged into a USB port, or you could access the port inside the case directly off the mother board.

A software based fix would be easiest for us though, then we wouldn't have to use up USB ports, and it is less drivers ( for the port ) we need to put in our hacked down versions of Windows Embedded - better for security and performance.

Maybe software which on installation does something like polls the PC's mac address and uses that as a basis of preventing illegal software use - if its not running on a PC with the correct MAC address, do whatever it does now when there's no dongle plugged in.

Steve L
Energy Efficiency & Automation
ECOsystems NZ

 

Whatever Dongle it maybe, just make sure its flexible

Gd day,

Yea, agreed with NZ on the dongle thingy. Sometimes when you want to test onsite with your NG (not "Not Good" but "Newer Generation") laptops like those Centrinos or Duo Cores, unlike we have our C-Lution with USB dongle, but your C-Gate runs with like 10 networks but you can only commission one by one (laugh).

Nowadays they dont come with 25pin parallel ports anymore unless you ask for it or got it from a specific model (i.e. DELL). Or maybe C-Gate does not yet have the feature like Rainbow Technologies or not cost-justified to co-develop a new set of API to utilize this - and talking with Parallel port is straight through authentication without any 3rd-party API's.

Well, just my 2-cents worth. Maybe Clipsal guys are already looking into it but have yet released a licensing framework and solution.