Category Archives: Network

Licensing and port 2080

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Port 2080 is the default port used by the Autodesk licensing service daemon (adskflex).

In most cases, you don’t have to specify the port number when you set ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE:

set ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE=LICSERVER-PC

Sometimes, depending on how the server is set up, you may need to add the port number:

set ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE=2080@LICSERVER-PC

Port 2080 is registered with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), and it’s unlikely you’ll ever have to use a different port.

But if you do, there’s two things you have to do. First, you need to change the port number on the VENDOR line of your license file:

SERVER LICSERVER-PC 0000deadbeef
USE_SERVER
VENDOR adskflex port=2081

Then, on all workstations and render nodes, you’ll have to include the port number in ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE:

set ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE=2081@LICSERVER-PC

Getting your new Softimage network license

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A quick overview of how to get your new Softimage license.

I didn’t have an actual serial number, so I couldn’t go through the whole process. For that, check out this KB article:

If you don’t know how to install your new license, then check out this 2012 video, where I download a new license file and then update LMTOOLS.
https://xsisupport.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/activating-your-softimage-2012-network-license/

Checking if you have the IPv6 version of the Autodesk Network License Manager

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Most people don’t have the IPv6 version of the Autodesk Network License Manager (NLM), because the IPv4 is installed by default.

To check if you have the IPv6 version, start LMTOOLs and go to the System Settings tab. If you have the IPv6 version, you’ll see an IPv6 IP address like fe80::252d:8892:22e8:34d6. If you have the IPv4 NLM, you’ll see a regular IP address like 10.123.456.78.

You can download the IPv6 NLM from autodesk.com/softimage-support.

Sometimes running the IPv4 NLM in an IPv6 environment will work, sometimes it won’t. Other times, you may have intermittent problems. I don’t do so many licensing cases anymore, but checking IPv6 was always on my list of things to check.

Just the other day, a customer reported that his render nodes could no longer get licenses. It turned out that after some recent updates, IPv6 was enabled and that was the cause of the problem. Installing the IPv6 NLM (or disabling IPv6) was the solution.

hat tip: my colleague David Lau from the Up and Ready blog

Installing the Autodesk Network License Manager (aka LMTOOLS)

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You can use the Softimage Setup program to install the Autodesk Network License Manager (video). Just click Install Tools and Utilities.

Alternatively, if you don’t have the full Softimage Setup on your license server computer, then you can download a standalone installer for ADLM from http://usa.autodesk.com/getdoc/id=TS13737466

Softimage 2011 always falls back to 127.0.0.1 for network licensing

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I’d forgotten about this until the other day when I tried to break my licensing for testing purposes.

I spent 20 minutes trying to get Softimage 2011 to not start! No matter what I did it kept starting up, and to make matters worse, my ProductInformation.pit file has some minor corruption that crashes Softimage when I try to use Help > About Softimage > Product License Information. So I couldn’t check where Softimage was getting its license.

I eventually resorted to using Process Monitor to watch the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\FLEXlm License Manager\ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE registry value, and I saw that xsi.exe was sticking 127.0.0.1 into the registry every time I started Softimage. So all I had to do was stop my local license server.

The case of the missing protocol file

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So, a customer called to report another no interactive network license available problem. We quickly narrowed it down to a problem with the license server: it wouldn’t start. Start Server said “Server started successfully”, but Perform Status Enquiry said FLEXnet Licensing error:-15,570. Everything about the license file checked out ok: it had the right MAC address, it had the right computer name, it had the right license features. But still the server wouldn’t start.

I was already WebEx’d into the customer’s computer, so I downloaded Process Monitor and used it to track what LMTOOLS was doing when I clicked Start Server.

When you click Start Server, lmtools.exe starts the service lmgrd.exe, so I filtered for all Processes that started with “lm”.

Scrolling down through the log, I soon saw a possible problem: repeated NAME NOT FOUND entries for the same file:

To check whether LMTOOLS eventually did find the protocol file, I right-clicked “C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\protocol” and clicked Include, to include only the log entries for the protocol file.

And sure enough, the protocol file was never found. So I copied over the protocol file from my system, and then I was able to start the license server.

Without Process Monitor, the only clue I had was this one line in the LMTOOLS debug log file:

(lmgrd) Failed to open any default TCP port.

ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE value in the registry

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Softimage saves the location of the license server in the registry. On Vista, the location is saved in the ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE value:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\FLEXlm License Manager

On my XP system, the value is saved under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.

Over time, you may end up with some obsolete license server locations saved in the registry. For example, if you replace your license server, the location of the old server is still in the registry.

So whenever you cannot get a license, and everything else seems to check out ok, open up regedit and clear the ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE value, to make sure Softimage is connecting to the right license server.

I had a support case the other week where the customer wrote

xsibatch cannot get a license, even though setenv.bat an exact copy of the setenv.bat from a machine where xsibatch can get a license.

It turned out the problem was because of ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE. After he deleted that value, xsibatch connected to the license server specified by setenv.bat and got a license.

WTFFFFFFFF ?

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Just before the Christmas break, I had a case where LMTOOLS reported FFFFFFFF as the Ethernet address, even though ipconfig /all showed a valid Physical address for the network adapater. Because of this, the license server wouldn’t start.

FFFFFFFF (eight F’s) is the broadcast address.

I tried a number of things, like resetting the TCP/IP stack with netsh with no success. I spent quite a bit of time on google, but most of the information was old and no longer applicable.

Eventually I figured out the problem, and was able to reproduce on my machine at home. It was the MAC Bridge Miniport: when I bridged my two network connections, then LMTOOLS thought the MAC address was FFFFFFFF.

 

To unbridge a network adapter:

  1. From the Control Panel, open Network Connections.
  2. Right-click your local area connection and click Remove from Bridge.
  3. Right-click the Network Bridge and click Disable.