WAN issue with FlexLM

[Eric Wing]

Here's one from a client that I can't figure out:

The issue involves ADT & REVIT licenses between 2 servers – PIRANHA (Auburn) & MOUNTAINEER (Malone).

On server Mountaineer I have (4) ADT licenses & (0) REVIT licenses. On server Piranha I have (2) ADT licenses and (10) REVIT licenses.

The users in Malone pulled their ADT licenses from MOUNTAINEER
Only server listed in the C:\Program Files\Autodesk Architectural Desktop\2005LICPATH.lic file is MOUNTAINEER.

The users in Auburn pulled their licenses from PIRANHA
Only server listed in the C:\Program Files\Autodesk Architectural Desktop\2005LICPATH.lic file is PIRANHA.

Only server listed in the C:\Program Files\Autodesk Revit Building 9.1\Program\2005LICPATH.lic file is PIRANHA.
At this point everything is working fine….

We then installed REVIT on the Malone user’s systems but pointed the license file to PIRANHA.

Only server listed in the C:\Program Files\Autodesk Revit Building 9.1\Program\2005LICPATH.lic file is PIRANHA.

Now – the Malone users can open REVIT fine – it pulls the licenses from PIRANAH. The problem is when the Malone users open ADT, even though the licpath.lic file only has MOUNTAINEER specified, the program will first pull a license from PIRANHA until all the licenses on PIRANHA are taken and then pulls a license from MOUNTAINEER.

The LM on MOUNTAINEER is running version 9.22 – the server is a single server running Windows 2003 Server R2.

Note: This server is a new server and we originally put LM version 10.8 on, with a new license file, but it did not work – we had to bring the LM back down to 9.22 to get this to work.

The LM on PIRANHA is running version 10.1.5 – the server is a single server running Windows 2000 Server SP4.

Both servers are configured to “Configuration using Services” with paths hardcoded in on the “Config Services” tab.

We have NO Windows firewalls running anywhere on our network.

[Avatart]

I would say that your issue probably revolves around the server heirarchy, which server is the dominant one? I would guess that mountaineer is higher in the server heirarchy than piranha.

The way we have configured our servers is to run them as mirror licence servers, so all the licences are on both servers, so if one goes down, we automatically switch to its mirror.

[DarrenYoung]

Look in the following registry key if it's there. I'd bet it is.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\FLEXlm License Manager

In this key, look for something like this...

ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE = @piranah;@mountaineer

The license "files" I've never messed with, I think they are ok for simple installations or configurations but in genneral, I think AutoCAD only uses them to push their data to the reigstry and FlexLM uses the registry which doesn't make a distinction between products. It just looks for license servers and has no awareness that it should use one server for one product or a different server for a different product. It searches in the order they are listed in the registry.

Change the order in the registry and you change the searh order. The location with ADT, make sure it's registry points to the server you want to. If the second server is listed second, Revit will still find those licenses after it checks the first server and sees there's none available.