For photopia, our technical support is intended to answer any questions you may have about the use of the software.

Technical support is only avaliable if you have an active Annual Maintenance contract.

If your Annual Maintenance contract is expired, you can use these online resources. If you need assistance beyond these, you may renew your Annual Maintenance contract.

It is beyond the scope of standard technical support to assist you in creating optics or teaching you SOLIDWORKS or Rhino.

We offer training if you need a quick start, more detailed help, or assistance with a specific project.

Windows 8.1 or 10

Windows 7 requires special steps outlined here.

Network Connection:

Photopia will require a periodic internet connection to obtain and update your license.

All connections are done using an encrypted https connection.

When must you login with your email and password?

• New Installation
• Have not opened Photopia/Solidworks/Reports in the past 30+ days
• Account was locked or password was reset

When must you be online?

• If you haven't opened the software in the last 3 days (default time)
• If your account has restricted offline privileges (not typical)

When can you use Photopia offline?

• If you have had the software open in the last 3 days
• If you currently have the software open

If your application has an error when logging in (red x's, etc), the first item to check is that you can open the my|photopia webpage and login. You can also confirm on this page that you have a license avaliable for the program you're trying to open.

If you can login to the webage and do have a license, then it is likely the communication from Photopia to our servers is being blocked in some way. The information below should help you identify what may be blocking this communication.

Network Connection:

Any time a Photopia application is launched or closed it will attempt to make a connection to our license servers.

Communication type:

• HTTP POST request
• XML content
• content-type = "application/xml"
• user-agent = "LTIConnect/1.0" (1.0 may change, so if filtering based on user agent, simply use the LTIConnect portion)

Applications which communicate for licensing:

• C:\Program Files\LTI Optics\ODShell.exe (and any ODShell.?????.exe)

Potential destination locations:

• https://licensing.ltioptics.com/createxmlsession (port 443)
• https://licensing.ltioptics.com/updatexmlsession (port 443)
• https://activation.ltioptics.com/createxmlsession (port 443)
• https://activation.ltioptics.com/updatexmlsession (port 443)
• https://myphotopia.ltioptics.com/createxmlsession (port 443)
• https://myphotopia.ltioptics.com/updatexmlsession (port 443)

Proxy:

Photopia can use the netsh WinHTTP proxy system and has been tested and works with a Static Proxy.

If you have a client machine or network level proxy system, you may need to have IT configure it so that our licensing traffic is routed to our licensing server.

Photopia does not include specific proxy controls. If a proxy server is in place, traffic destined to *.ltioptics.com should be transparent or bypass the proxy.

You can verify if you are using the netsh winhttp proxy system by running this command: netsh winhttp show proxy

If this command shows no proxy information and you have a proxy, then it is not the netsh winhttp proxy and so you may need to manually add an SSL/HTTPS bypass or transparent redirect to the desintations listed above. Other proxies may change the SSL version or modify the SSL certificate which will cause our licensing system to fail.

This is the typical error message you'll see with a proxy issue: The connection with the server has been reset or terminated, or an incompatible SSL protocol was encountered. For example, WinHTTP version 5.1 does not support SSL2 unless the client specifically enables it"

Firewall:

You may need to allow the Photopia application thru the firewall if your firewall is blocking applications by default. You will need to allow Outbound traffic from all ODShell.?????.exe's in this folder C:\Program Files\LTI Optics\

Since Photopia communicates over port 443 (standard for https), it is unlikley that an exception/rule will need to be created for that port, but it may.

Antivirus:

All Photopia applications are code-signed, however we have still seen some cases where an antivirus package blocks the network connection. If you have an antivirus application, we recommend disabling and attempting to open Photopia. If this works, you may need to allow an exemption for our program in your antivirus software.

Read/Write folder access:

Licensing information is stored in the following folder, which the user must have read/write access to.

%LocalAppData%\LTI Optics\

If you are using Windows 7 and your application has an error when logging in (red x's, etc) you will likely need to perform the following steps to upgrade the TLS (security) support in Windows 7.

These steps have become necessary because the default TLS in Windows 7 is TLS 1.0, which has now officially been deprecated by most hosting services due to security vulnerabilities.

Follow the steps in this article.

Using the updates you can download here.

Which will include making this registry modification.