I was seeking documentation on FlexLM usage by products from Mentor Graphics. Their support site was easy enough to find, but every time I clicked a link to a document that looked relevant, I was taken to a login page.
Usability annoyance tangent:
The link entitled Learn how to use SupportNet, opens a new browser window with a full window flash applet, and in my case a dialog box explaining "This tutorial was designed to work on screens of 1024x768 or greater, and therefore you may have trouble seeing the entire screen. Note: the tutorial control is located on the bottom of the window". I note that I was doing this from a laptop with a 1024x768 screen.
Not actually wanted an account on the support site, but seeing no other
option, I follow the link to Sign Up.
The first thing I see is a warning in red "Registration requests are processed within 24 hours of receiving email verification." Sigh, I was hoping to resolve this matter today. I fill out the form and moments later recieve an email asking me to verify my email address and reminding me that they are the only EDA vendor that has 5 STAR support. Who would have guessed that requiring your customers to jump through meaningless hoops is one of the requirements of the STAR awards. I can understand requiring registration to download software, but there is no excuse to lock up the knowledge base and how-to documents.
The link that verified my email address did take me to a page saying I
could peruse SupportNet as a lowly guest. I wasn't able to download the updated Mentor specific Flexlm pieces I needed, but I did much of the information I needed. Why must software companies make the lives of systems administrators more difficult?
We use a good of software that is locked up by FlexLM. FlexLM is a license management and enforcement system sold by Macrovision (formerlly Globetrotter) to makers of software. The system can enforce all sorts of policies; most of the time it either locks a program to only run a specific computer (tied to mac address, hardware dongle, ip address, etc.) or allows a vendor daemon running on a server to provide a certain number of client workstations to run the software concurrently.
Each of the nine application suites that we use that use FlexLM have a license file that is tied to a MAC Address. As part of our efforts to clean and make sane our critical infrastructure we made plans to move the FlexLM daemons to a virtual machine. Since VMware does not by default guarantee that a MAC address for a virtual machine will never change, I followed the best practices laid out by VMware to manually set a MAC.
The short version of that best practices document is that the range 00:50:56:00:00:00-00:50:56:3F:FF:FF is available for assignment by the end user. I choose 00:50:56:00:00:01. It seems one of the vendors of an application thought it was fake and questioned it. Oops, I hadn't thought about that issue. Cutting and pasting the output from the ifconfig command put an end to the complaint.
A few Friday's ago, at 11:48pm I recieved an email from our new Network Appliance filer indicating that a hard disk had failed. The subject was "FILESYSTEM DISK NOT RESPONDING". Shortly there after, I recieved an email from my boss (who was at the time in the process of transitioning to said new filer);
"Score! A disk failure in the middle of the rsync."
A bit later (at 1:35am) we recieved an email from Netapp asking us to confirm the address we wanted the new drive sent to and to confirm that someone would be there for the next several hours. It seems we have four hour repair service for our filer, and that includes getting us replacements on weekends and in middle of the night.
Slight Tangent: The drive traveled less than 10 miles from a UPS logistics warehouse to the company. Had I as a random person paid for that UPS SonicAir service, it would have cost nearly $150. Woweee
