As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, in support I’m often doing the opposite of what users do: I’m trying to break the licensing, because I’m testing something. And sometimes it can be really hard to do 😉

The other day I was trying to force Softimage (on Linux) to use a certain license server that didn’t have the right licenses, but no matter what I did, Softimage kept getting a license from somewhere else. After an extremely frustrating 30 minutes, I tracked it down to the ~/.flexlmrc file, which had a list of the license servers that Softimage has successfully used at some point:

ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE=@mtl-blairs:@mtl-licserver

If Softimage can’t check out a license from the server specified in .xsi_2012, then it tries the servers listed in ~/.flexlmrc.

So all I had to do was remove the extra license servers and leave only the server specified in my .xsi_2012 resource file.

~/.flexlmrc is the Linux version of the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\FLEXlm License Manager\ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE registry key on Windows.