In this case, a customer received his new 2013 license for four seats of Softimage. He was able to start Softimage 2013 on four machines, but he could run Softimage 2012 on two machines only. What could be the problem?!?

Now, to diagnose this problem, you could do any one of a number of things:

• Check the license file to make sure it has the right licenses.
• Check the Perform Status Enquiry output from LMTOOLS, to make sure the license is actually installed.
• Check the LMTOOLS debug log file, to see why the workstations are being refused Softimage 2012 licenses.
• Check the workstations, to make sure they are configured properly for licensing.
• Verify that when the customer tries to start 2012, they don’t have copies of Softimage 2013 still running.
• Check the customer’s assets in our database (make sure they really have four licenses).

In this particular case, I could identify the issue by either checking the customers assets OR checking the actual license file. Because the problem was this:

Here’s a video walkthrough of a license file, where I point out what to look for when you’re trying to understand a license file.

In this video, I show you to tell what you’ve got in a license file.