In this case, I got a debug log from a customer, but there weren’t any rlm entries in the log. As I’ve mentioned before, the Arnold log can include entries for licensing. At the Warning + Info level, you’ll get [rlm] log entries like these, if something goes wrong:

00:00:10   444MB WARNING | [rlm] could not connect to any license server

or

00:00:00   444MB WARNING | [rlm] wrong license version for arnold 20140305, found licenses for:
00:00:00   444MB WARNING | [rlm] arnold 20140206 (20 licenses)
00:00:00   444MB WARNING | [rlm] arnold 20140206 (20 licenses)
00:00:00   444MB WARNING | [rlm] please contact licensing@solidangle.com

or

00:00:03   749MB WARNING | [rlm] error checking out license for arnold (version 20140113):
00:00:03   749MB WARNING | [rlm]  * Communications error with license server (-17)
00:00:03   749MB WARNING | [rlm]  * Connection refused at server (-111)

And if you move the verbosity level up to Debug, then you’ll get some information about where Arnold is trying to get a license:

00:00:00   444MB         | [rlm] checking connection to license servers ...
00:00:05   444MB         | [rlm]  5055@LICSERVER1 ... DOWN
00:00:10   444MB         | [rlm]  5053@localhost ... DOWN

So why didn’t the customer’s log show any rlm entries? He was getting watermarks, so something must be wrong, right? Well, something was wrong: Skip License Check was enabled in the Render Settings.

No rlm log entries = Skip License Check