How does Untangle detect that a license is in use for a host? For example a small office just setup an Untangle and they use laptops in meeting rooms wirelessly but when gong back to their desks they are docked used Thunderbolt docks that have ethernet ports. I am concerned that as their staff returns to office they are gong to exceed their license counts if each laptop is consuming two licenses due to two separate network interfaces detected as two separate hosts in Untangle.
Untangle counts 'hosts', meaning 'unique IP addresses'. Assuming that the laptop has the same IP address when it's on the dock, it would still be the same host. Some docks are robust enough to count as network devices unto themselves, though, and it may be that the dock itself has an IP address; in that case, the NGFW would indeed see two different devices.
But the dock is in shutdown state (no ip) if the notebook is not attached to him. In other words "In the same time period" always this notebook+dock have one ip address.
Untangle count concurrent and simultaneously.
The dock ethernet port has it's own MAC thus would be getting a unique IP from DHCP. I have done work arounds with custom DHCP configs for non-window devices such as below
## IoT Appliances
dhcp-host=94:9A:A9:09:41:4C,94:9a:a9:09:41:4e,192.168.10.12
I would hate to do a static address per device to get around this. But when tried with Windows machines the DHCP client doesn't "give up" the IP address on the old interface when the DHCP bid goes out for the newly connected interface an you get an error message of duplicate IP address. I am going to see if there is something new that Windows 10 provides to keep the same IP.
Yes that is correct that there is no IP when not docked for the NIC in the docking station. As long as Untangle is able to quickly identify the non-used IP address it should prevent the condition of running out of licenses. A simple solution would not to use the ethernet port of the dock and just keep everything wifi but I am a old school, wired first, person.
You are correct. There will be two hosts licenses used, one for the wireless of the laptop and one for the dock when the laptop is connected to the dock.
Just throwing this in again and saying yes.
Laptops with their own wired interface? That's one license...
Wifi? That's another one...
Docking station? That's a third.
No one knows how long a given address counts before it doesn't, and the licensing is concurrent use based. So unless you have a ton of this happening, it shouldn't be effecting your license bucket all that much.