How to debug licensing problems

What licensing mechanism is used for your problematic software?

A lot of software you can order via IDES use a network licensing mechanism. That means that a client that wants to use some software first needs to ask the license server if there is a free license available. There are several software implementations for network licensing. The most prominent one is FLEXnet. If you ordered a license via IDES and the license email from IDES states that you have to enter some port and license server information during installation, the licensing system used is probably FLEXnet. An example is MATLAB.

FLEXnet license debugging

What you need:

• The name of the license server.
• The port on which the license service is listening on the licens server.

• The lmutil command line tool.

Port and license server name

You will find these information in the email you got from IDES after ordering the software. If you did not order the software by yourself (e.g. if you work on a machine not managed by you), you might find that information

• through a menu entry of the application
• in the installation folder of the software
• in the registry (if you are running a Microsoft product)
• in an environment variable

FLEXnet lmutil command line tool

You have several possibilities to use that tool.

• Log in to one of our managed Linux clients and use the one already installed there.
• Install it by yourself. You do not need to have administrator rights for this.

Installation of lmutil on Windows

• Go to http://www.globes.com/support/fnp_utilities_download.htm

• Download the lmutil ZIP file for your plattform.

• Extract it.

• Open a cmd prompt (Click on "Start" > "Run", enter "cmd" and click "OK")

• Run lmutil. E.g. enter "c:\lmutil_i86_n3\lmutil.exe"

Installation of lmutil on Linux

• Go to http://www.globes.com/support/fnp_utilities_download.htm

• Download the lmutil tar.gz file for your plattform.

• Extract it. E.g. `tar -xvvzkf lmutil_i86_re3.tar.gz'.

• Make it executable: chmod u+x lmutil

• Run lmutil: ./lmutil

Usage of lmutil

If you run lmutil help it will print out a list of options. If you want to know the details of, e.g., the lmstat option, just run lmutil lmstat help. Here are some examples (just replace PORT and SERVER with the corresponding information for your software):

• lmutil lmstat -c PORT@SERVER -a
• lmutil lmstat -c PORT@SERVER -i
• lmutil lmstat -c PORT@SERVER -f
• lmutil lmdiag -c PORT@SERVER -n