Maintaining the Autodesk Login Token (Problems and Help)

Many of our customers have encountered challenges with maintaining the Autodesk Login Token, which keeps your Clarity Task Server signed in to Revit as a particular user.

We'd like to review some basic information about the problem and then talk about some recent improvements on our side:

The Basics

The token is shared between all Autodesk products on a particular machine. By itself, each token lasts for 14 days. So it should only be necessary to sign in once every 14 days.

However - with the advent of Autodesk Desktop Connector, this changed. With Desktop Connector installed - Desktop Connector will, approximately once per day, extend the token by another day. So if Desktop Connector is working perfectly, you should be able to stay logged in indefinitely.

Here's the challenge - there are now a wide variety of Autodesk products that are all reading, writing and updating that token, potentially at the same time. We've identified two components that - if they are not in harmony with each other can step on each other and lose the token instantly:  Desktop Connector and the Autodesk AdSSO Component. This may not be visible to regular users (who among us has not been prompted an extra time per day to "sign in again"... you sigh and move on) - but it's very visible to Clarity Task Servers, who are suddenly unable to process tasks, and have limited ability to re-sign in.

We had been recommending that customers keep their Desktop Connector and AdSSO Components always super-updated. However, it seems that is not the best answer.. Autodesk frequently releases Desktop Connector updates, and some recent versions have exhibited this issue. The better approach seems to be to identify a "good" version, and stick with it for as long as possible.

Contact our support department for our unofficial list of "good" versions (although we've started keeping the list officially below).

The Improvements

In Clarity 2021.1, we've recently put out a host update and task update to assist with this issue (while admittedly not quite getting to the root cause). The new update will:

• Constantly monitor the state of the token.
• Any diagnostics sent in will include all token-related information, including your Desktop Connector and AdSSO version.
• If the token has gone from a "good" to "bad" state, it will send an alert within 10 minutes - to whomever is defined as wanting Task Server Alerts in the  Metrics/Alerts/Task Servers page within Clarity. That user will receive an email notification that the Task Server will need to be signed in again.

We realize that this still may fall short of where you would hope. We are also frustrated by our lack of control over this, and we're pushing Autodesk to remember batch automation when they design such things in the future. We have some additional ideas on what we might be able to do - because we want to make Clarity into the tool that you can "set-it-and-forget-it".

We keep the latest suggested versions of Desktop Connector and AdSSO here.