What does Usage-Based Licensing’s "Not enough credit" even mean? How do I solve it?

When your job’s tasks are flipping between “waiting to start” and “queued” and you’re making use of UBL this is a common error to see when viewing the Worker log, but what is it all about? It’s not necessarily that you need to buy more. If your jobs are picking up but throwing errors you’ll want to follow Third Party Usage Based Licenses Checkout Failure instead.

To understand, I’ll explain how the UBL process works with an analogy. Think of the minutes you purchase as water needed for rendering. When you purchase licenses from the Marketplace it fills what I like to think of as a virtual well of minutes that Deadline can draw from. As jobs with license limits are picked up the Workers have their own bucket of local minutes to draw from and if it’s empty they have their local buckets filled. The error about “not enough credit” is actually when the Worker has requested the bucket be filled but for some reason it hasn’t succeeded. It can’t do anything with an empty bucket.

To find out why it didn’t succeed you need to read the log lines that come before this error to get an idea. We’ll get to that now.

Solving the problem

The solution (and whether you can solve the issue yourself) depends on the error message. Here are the most common ones we see.

UBL Is misconfigured

[1,7de,9,0[70000001,0,120b0256]] One of the input parameters is bad.

This is a rather generic error where the licensing system failed to communicate correctly from Deadline to the license server we host for you. If you’ve re-entered your UBL information into “Configure Repository → UBL” (it will always be blank after we introduced Secrets Manager so re-entering is the only way to confirm it’s correct) you’ll need to reach out to us, so please cut a ticket or call us if it’s urgent.

Communications Problems

[1,7e3,4,0[75000001,7,30010256]] General data transfer failure. Couldn't connect to server 

This is what it sounds like. Deadline wasn’t able to connect to the license servers we’re hosting. The most common reason customers reach out to us with this error is that they’ve enabled Web Forwarding in the UBL settings without configuring it. If neither your render nodes nor License Forwarder (there’s one hidden in Gateway instance the AWS Portal Infrastructure launches) are able to connect to the Internet you’ll see this. In general, if you don’t know what Web Forwarding is for, try disabling it, restart your Workers (the application, the whole render machine is not necessary) and try again. If you know you need it and it’s still not working after following the configuration guide, cut us a ticket and tell us how far you made it the process.

If Web Forwarding is absolutely not enabled, treat this as you might a standard connection issue. If you rely on an IT department or you’re your own IT department, the important location we’re trying to talk to is your license server URL that you’re using for UBL. It looks like https://thinkbox.compliance.flexnetoperations.com/instances/XXXXXXXXXXXX/request where the XXXXXXXXXX part is some letters and numbers and we e-mail a copy of that. If you don’t have that e-mail you can find it in the customer portal.

The test we’ll typically ask you to do is to open a command prompt or terminal and run the following:

curl https://thinkbox.compliance.flexnetoperations.com/instances/XXXXXXXXXXXX/request

It may be DNS or your Internet connection. In general, you or your IT department are going to need to find out why that’s not working. You can also place the URL in a browser and you should see something about “Request method 'GET' not supported” if things are working properly.

Conclusion

There are more ways the system can misbehave and we’ll come back and update this as new common issues arise. We have UBL troubleshooting information focused on general usability in the Third Party Usage Based Licenses Checkout Failure article so feel free to give that a read to be ready if you or others hit those.

Reach out to us If you are unable to figure out the issue by following the advice above.