FlexLM Licence Manager Tricks (IDL version)

This is more of a very special entry for myself in order to store information - but maybe for some of you out there information of this might be useful.

The FlexLM Lincense manager is used e.g. by idl to distribute floating licenses. It uses two TCP/IP ports for communication, the first normally being 1700, the second one is chosen randomly in the standard installation. To fix the second port (which might be useful in order to configure the firewall of the server running it ;-) ) add the following to the specific license.dat file you received:

DAEMON idl_lmgrd /usr/local/itt/idl70/bin *PORT=31700

Another important step is to run the FlexLM license manager as a non-privileged user - which you can achieve by the following procedure:

1. create a non-privileged user flexlm with own group and own user id - password set to * in order to avoid direct login and give it the standard shell /bin/sh


2. locate the license files and manager executables and change their access rights to readable for the flexlm user (and group).
   


3. locate the startup script (in my case on a SuSE 10.2 machine it is stored in /etc/init.d/sys5_idl_lmgrd)
   and modify the line where the daemon is started to:
   
   su flexlm -c "{original command line in startup file}"
   
4. in the startup script add the line
   
   umask 022
   directly after
   
   #!/bin/sh