Please find below a collection of questions we commonly get asked by IT administrators when deploying and managing Viscosity. For more in-depth deployment information please refer to the other guides available in the Enterprise category.

How Do I Distribute Viscosity With Included Settings and VPN Connections?

Viscosity can be bundled with settings and VPN connections by following the Bundling Viscosity with VPN Connections & Preferences (Mac) and Bundling Viscosity with VPN Connections & Preferences (Windows) guides.

How Do I Distribute a Licensed Copy of Viscosity?

When creating a bundled version of Viscosity, the license details can be included as part of the bundled settings. This avoids end users needing to enter license details themselves.

For more information please refer to the "Bundling in a License/Registration Details" section in the Bundling Viscosity with VPN Connections & Preferences (Mac) and Bundling Viscosity with VPN Connections & Preferences (Windows) guides.

Please be aware that copies of Viscosity bundled with your license details should not be made publicly available, as this could potentially allow unlicensed users to use your license. Your bundled version of Viscosity should instead be placed behind a login or on an internal network.

Do You Provide a Portal for Tracking and Managing Viscosity Installations?

We do not provide a portal or system that allows Viscosity installations to be tracked and managed remotely. Thus far we've been resistant to Viscosity phoning home to check and manage licensing in any meaningful way as we feel it would be overstepping the privacy bounds of a VPN client. Businesses are required self-asses their volume/site usage. Please see the questions further below for more information.

How Do I Track the Number of Installations?

For small deployments we recommend simply keeping a manual record of seat/license allocations.

For larger enterprise environments tools such as SCCM, Jamf, or Munki are able to handle license management, usage tracking, and remote deactivation. For more information about these deployment tools please refer to the Enterprise category.

How Do I Reassign a Seat to a Different User or Computer?

Information on how to move or reassign a seat can be found in the Moving a License to a Different User or Machine section of the Using Your License On Multiple Computers article.

Does Viscosity Prevent Exceeding the Licensed Seat Count?

Viscosity does not actively enforce seat limits. As above, we've been resistant to phoning home with detailed installation and device information necessary to enforce this client-side as we feel it would be overstepping the privacy bounds of a VPN client. Businesses are required to self-asses their usage to ensure that stay within their licensed limit. Licenses exceeding their licensed seat count may be blacklisted without notice, which cannot be undone.

For example, if you have a 10 seat volume license, and you install Viscosity for another user bringing the usage up to 11 seats, Viscosity will not prevent this or disable another existing installation. However, doing so is in violation of Viscosity's End User License Agreement.

As above, tools such as SCCM, Jamf, or Munki are able to handle license management, usage tracking, and remote deactivation if required. Another option is to purchase an unlimited-seat license, please contact us if you’re interested in this option.

How Do I Add Seats or Expand an Existing Volume License?

The Upgrade section of our online store can be used to instantly add additional seats to an existing volume license. For more information please see the License Upgrades and Volume Extensions article.

How Do I View the Licensed Seat Count of a Volume License?

The Upgrade section of our online store can be used to view the licensed seat count of a volume license. Simply enter the license details, and then look for the seat count listed in the license information area. This seat count includes any additional extensions.

Do I Need to Renew My Viscosity License?

Standard Viscosity individual and volume licenses are perpetual and do not need to be renewed. There are no recurring fees or subscriptions to keep your Viscosity license. All future 1.x updates are included. For more information please see Viscosity License Inclusions.

Do Viscosity Licenses Expire?

Standard Viscosity individual and volume licenses are perpetual and do not expire. For more information, please see the "Do I Need to Renew My Viscosity License?" question above.

If your copy of Viscosity has become unregistered, or Viscosity is no longer accepting your license details, this is not due to a license expiring. Please see the "Why Are Viscosity Installations Becoming Unregistered?" question below for more information.

Why Are Viscosity Installations Becoming Unregistered?

If a registered copy of Viscosity appears to be losing its license details and reverting to trial mode or prompting for registration, it likely means something on the machine is resetting or deleting Viscosity's preferences data.

If this is happening unexpectedly, please check that any installed enterprise management software or deployment tools are not resetting or deleting Viscosity's preferences/settings file. Likewise, make sure that any security software, such as antivirus software or similar tools, are not blocking Viscosity from saving its preferences to disk. The location of Viscosity's preferences/settings file can be found in the Backing up Viscosity's Settings article.

Another potential cause is not actually registering Viscosity in the first place. When first installed, Viscosity will run for 30-days in a trial mode with no registration needed. Only when this 30-day period is up will Viscosity require license details be entered to operate. Viscosity should be either manually registered or bundled with license data. Please see the "How Do I Distribute a Licensed Copy of Viscosity?" question above for more information.

Another possibility for environments with multi-user machines is that Viscosity is only being registered for a single user on each machine (or registered for the wrong user account). By default, Viscosity is only registered under the user account that entered the license information. This means that if a different user logs into the machine, Viscosity will not be registered for that user. Viscosity can be registered in a machine-wide fashion by using the "Viscosity Managed Installer" template. This template can be downloaded from the Jamf or Munki guides in the Enterprise category. Most deployment software will also allow you to deploy preferences in a machine-wide manner.

Finally, a registered copy of Viscosity can also become unregistered if the license details used to register it are no longer valid. For example, if a legacy single-platform license was recently upgraded to a cross-platform license, the old license details will become invalid. Viscosity should be registered using the newly issued license details in such an instance.

How Do I Stop Viscosity From Automatically Updating?

If you manage software updates via deployment software, you may wish to disable Viscosity's inbuilt update support. This can be achieved by creating a version of Viscosity bundled with the automatic update setting turned off. The easiest way to bundle this setting is to turn off automatic updates in the copy of Viscosity being used as the bundle template, and then use the associated preferences/settings file.

For more information please refer to the Bundling Viscosity with VPN Connections & Preferences (Mac) and Bundling Viscosity with VPN Connections & Preferences (Windows) guides.

Is a SOC 2 or Similar Security Report Available for Viscosity?

Typically when we’re asked for such reports it’s under the mistaken belief that Viscosity is a service (similar to commercial VPN Service Providers or a cloud provider) and that customer data is passing through our network. This isn’t the case: no customer data or VPN network traffic passes through our network or any of our servers. For further information please refer to the "Products" section in our Privacy Policy.

For information regarding the security of the OpenVPN protocol, please refer to the Security Overview page on the OpenVPN wiki.

Further information regarding the security of Viscosity updates and network connections can be found in the Security of Updates & Outbound Connections article.