Life of a Sysadmin

The occassional trials and tribulations of a jack of all tr ades sysadmin in a startup in Silicon Valley

archives

October 2008 (2)
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April 2008 (1)
March 2008 (6)
December 2007 (6)
October 2007 (1)
September 2007 (1)
August 2007 (2)
July 2007 (1)
June 2007 (5)
May 2007 (5)
April 2007 (3)
March 2007 (7)
February 2007 (2)
January 2007 (3)
December 2006 (4)
November 2006 (3)
October 2006 (3)
August 2006 (3)
July 2006 (1)
June 2006 (2)
May 2006 (4)
April 2006 (2)
March 2006 (5)
February 2006 (5)
January 2006 (7)
December 2005 (2)
November 2005 (6)
October 2005 (4)
September 2005 (4)
August 2005 (1)
July 2005 (2)
June 2005 (3)
May 2005 (4)
April 2005 (1)
March 2005 (2)

October 2006

Virtual MAC Addresses, or Perhaps I should have been more subtle

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.