Every year we receive a number of support questions which have to do with licensing. We hate to receive them, because licensing should be easy! For the most part it is, as many customers never run into any problems at all. However, when a problem does crop up customers frequently feel at a loss. Today’s blog will address some of the issues with maintenance and product versions which occasionally trip people up.

When you have a problem, and write to support, we will frequently ask you to send two things: your license file and your license server log. Sending these with your initial inquiry will typically save a lot of time.

First, it’s important to understand what’s in your license file. Also please note you may have one or more license files. I will use the license file below as an example; this file contains one license for the MÄK Data Logger, and one license for VR-Link.

SERVER oak 000bdb511138
DAEMON maklmgrd ./maklmgrd
PACKAGE vrl maklmgrd 2010.113 ccccD081E2C6CD700000 COMPONENTS="hvl1 \
	hvl2 dvl1 dvl2 vl3"
PACKAGE logger maklmgrd 2010.113 ccccC0B11111C4900000
	COMPONENTS="hlog1 dlog1 log1"
INCREMENT vrl maklmgrd 2010.113 permanent 1 cccc3111118085500000 \
	PLATFORMS=i86_n
INCREMENT logger maklmgrd 2010.113 permanent 1 cccc11111B3770A00000 \
	PLATFORMS=i86_n
If a customer sent us this license file with a problem there are a few important things we would take note of:
  1. It’s a server based license which needs to be run on a machine named “oak” with a lmhostid (it’s your mac-address on the server machine) of “000bdb511138”.
  2. The PACKAGE’s are important: “logger” and “vrl” mean the customer is entitled to VR-Link and the Logger.
  3. The maintenance expiration date is 2010.113. That means the license is good for all the versions which were released before the 113thday of 2010.
  4. The COMPONENTS part is seldom relevant. It’s machine generated and pretty much never wrong.
Item #3 is important and often a large source of confusion. Knowing the maintenance date will allow you to look at our web site (http://www.mak.com/products/productversions.php) to determine which versions of products you are entitled to. Problems with the maintenance date will show up with a FlexLM Error dialog (or in the Log) saying something like: 
License server system does not support this version of this feature.

That error means you have a license to use the product, but your maintenance isn’t up-to date and therefore you aren’t entitled to use this version of the product. It typically means your maintenance isn’t up to date. However, you should only pay attention to this error when your MAK application does not actually work.

Here’s the catch: many users see this error in their license file but don’t have any problems running the actual application. A customer will run into this “error” when they are trying to figure out a different problem or are just looking through the license server. Careful inspection of the license log will show something like this:

7:14:38 (maklmgrd) DENIED: "rti5" jim@oak  (License server system
does not support this version of this feature. (-25,334))
7:14:38 (maklmgrd) OUT: "rti5" jim@oak
Typically the DENIED keyword catches people’s attention. However, in this situation the “problem” is benign. This line will occur because there are actually two entitlements in the license file (or files): The original license which has expired and an upgrade when maintenance was renewed. You should be able to confirm this by looking for INCREMENT and UPDATE lines which will be listed when the license server starts (at the top of the file). This is entirely expected behavior. The license server tries to check out a license from the first license file it finds. If it doesn’t succeed, it tries the second. These types of errors can be safely ignored. So sleep well tonight!