One of the Maya support agents forwarded a case to me last Friday: installing the Softimage license server breaks the 3ds Max license server.

It turned out that the 3ds Max license server, which was on a physically separate computer, had gone down. The Softimage license server had nothing to do with it. It was just a coincidence (besides, installing a license server on machine A cannot break a license server running on machine B; the two license servers are completely separate).

Anyway, the 3ds Max license server was in a locked room, and the person with the key was on vacation. To check the status of the 3ds Max license server, we had to use the license manager installed on a another computer. The LMTOOLS GUI is kind of flakey, so it is better to use the command line.

To check whether the license server is up, you can run this command:

lmutil lmstat -c 27000@server
or
lmutil lmstat -c @server

To check the usage status of Softimage Advanced 7.5:

lmutil lmstat -c @server -f 78800SFTIMA_7_5F

To check the usage status of the Batch licenses:

lmutil lmstat -c @server -f 78800SFTIMASIB1_7_5F
lmutil lmstat -c @server -f 78800SFTIMASIB2_7_5F
lmutil lmstat -c @server -f 78800SFTIMASIB3_7_5F
lmutil lmstat -c @server -f 78800SFTIMASIB4_7_5F
lmutil lmstat -c @server -f 78800SFTIMASIB5_7_5F

Notes

• The -c flag allows you to specify a “license file”, which for FLEXnet licensing is usually really port@host.
• To check the status of a remote license server using the local LMTOOLS, I had to set the environment variable ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE to point to the remote server before I started LMTOOLS.exe.
• The Autodesk KB also suggests another way to use LMTOOLS to check the remote license server.