Riccardo Schiaffino’s excellent blog About Translation had a new intriguing post yesterday about circumventing a limitation in Trados that will not let you run two copies of the freelance version on a LAN. He suggested a hardware-based solution. Read more about this on his post.
However, this reminded me of a quick hack I pulled off a couple of years ago when we were still using Trados quite a lot:
Hi Riccardo,
good tip, but I can recall a better one from the time we were still using Trados quite a lot (we later transitioned to memoQ and never looked back) and some freelancers were hooking up their laptops at the office for the purpose of importing/exporting files and memories.
As a workaround for this license limitation I installed a free copy of a software-based firewall (I think it was Comodo Firewall, but the functionality is similar in other firewall packages). I then disabled some of the packets that the newly-connected laptops were sending out on the LAN. I may be wrong, but I think these were the multicast packets. You may need to fiddle a bit with the options before finding the type of packet you need to disable.
With some luck, file sharing will not affected by the modification, while Trados will not complain any longer about the extra licenses.
Legally speaking, I’m not sure how such a modification can be considered in view of the software license agreement. But since you are not touching Trados in any way and are only changing some of the networking features of the OS, let’s say there’s room for interpretations…
I gave different network group names to each computer. I would still get file sharing between computers by bookmarking the folder share on a different network, so no harm done. Still, in some cases you may need all the PCs connected to the same network for using other services.
I like your solution better, anyway!
Hi Jordi,
thanks for your comment and for the suggested workaround. I’m sure some people will find it useful.