Make LMHOSTID to output MAC in "UNIX format" when ran in linux

Hi all!
I am trying to circumvent a licensing problem due to the fact that the
FlexLM's command "LMHOSTID" returns hostids in different formats
depending wether the OS is UNIX (Solaris) or linux. I explain a
little...

In our lab we have a license file for our license server, which is a
sun box with MAC address in the format aA:bB:cC:dD:eE:fF (in our
particular case, all "a", "b" and "B" are zero). For this server the
"LMHOSTID" command returns a reduced-format, 8-digit MAC: ABdDeEfF
(notice that not only does it discard the non-significant zeros "a"
and 'b', but also the whole third byte 'cC'!).

The thing is that this sun server crashed in an unrecoverable way (its
completely dead!), and we urgently need to setup a new, emergency
license server on a linux box (which allows the MAC address to be set)
and reuse the SAME license file (I must clarify that this is because
for the moment we cannot afford a license re-homing -neither in terms
of time nor money!). The problem is that for this linux box the
"LMHOSTID" command returns the complete 12-digit MAC address
(aAbBcCdDeEfF). Thus, the licensing daemons cannot validate the
license file (whose keys were encoded for the reduced, UNIX version
hostid) when ran in this machine, and I get a lot of "Invalid license
key (inconsistent authentication code)" errors when trying to set the
license server up

This all is very frustrating since we just received our new license
file for the 2007 year, but we won't be able to use it in the old
server due to the aforementioned reason. Could anybody please provide
any clues as to how to overcome this problem? It seems that the only
thing I need is a way of "fooling" lmhostid to "read" the MAC address
in "unix format" (reduced 8-digit MAC) and not in "linux format" (full
12-digit MAC)...

Thanks in advance for any help!
Regards,
JL.

 

You are in a corporate environment and you want to falsify information
sent to a license server. Tell me what's wrong with this.
This is not your money, no one is going to thank you when things go
wrong.

Contact the vendor and get the license transferred.

 

Sorry, but I think you have misinterpreted the situation...

Actually, I am not in a corporate environment: I am a graduate student
at a Peruvian university (you do know where Perú is that, right?)

We barely have the money for paying an educational licence, which also
means that we have no support whatsoever from the vendor. The license
rehoming costs a cold thousand dollars, which is totally OUT of our
budget (guess how many times that is the average per capita peruvian
incomme!). I am not even getting paid for trying to solve this
problems... I am only an student which needs the software running for
completing his thesis project!

Now, any REAL help form others???

 

I think you're unlikely to have any success w/this approach.

Unless Cadence salesfolk in Peru are very different from those I've
dealt with over the years, it is very likely you can get the rehost
fee
waived by extremely polite abject begging, accompanied by a
signed letter from your dean of engineering and a photograph of
the smoking hulk of your ex-license server.

If for some reason that fails, be aware that on Solaris/SPARC,
I believe the flex code does use gethostid(3c), which reads the
system board ID prom, and which does not necessarily have
anything to do w/the MAC address. You're quite right that
the "hostid" for a linux flex license file is a different format
altogether (and does AFAIK, have to be the "primary" MAC
address). You simply may not be able to get there from
here.

Assuming that your old license server was in fact actually
old (an SS2 or Ultra-10, or something like that) then your best
bet is simply to buy replacement hardware. Should be quite
cheap, since it's old, all you want is something that will boot.
Then you swap the ID prom and go on your merry way.

A well-crafted plea to the sun-managers mailing list would
probably get you what you need for the cost of shipping.

-Jay-