[35] in Layered Athena
License Servers and Iron
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (nschmidt@Athena.MIT.EDU)
Tue Aug 31 09:54:22 1993
From: nschmidt@Athena.MIT.EDU
To: cec@Athena.MIT.EDU, dmw@Athena.MIT.EDU, gjackson@Athena.MIT.EDU,
Cc: layered-athena@Athena.MIT.EDU, nschmidt@Athena.MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 93 09:52:26 EDT
The scheme that Jeff had proposed at our Layered policy meeting a few weeks
ago seems to be difficult, if not impossible, to implement using commercial
license servers. What follows is a message from Dot, based on her
investigation into the license managers that come with products that
currently use this technology. It looks as if our best course of action is
to revive the effort to construct some sort of wrapper that will allow us to
restrict the use of 3rd party software to a fixed set of workstations, which
would include all the public and departmental workstations.
I would still like to reopen the question about whether or not Layered Athena
should supply any commercial 3rd party software applications along with its
other layers, or whether it should be more like we envision Athena on Mac and
DOS platforms.
Naomi
Dot's message follows:
>We currently have three different license servers in use on Athena:
>FlexLM, Elan, and FrameMaker's proprietary system. Of these, FlexLM and
>the Frame license server have the capability of allowing/denying
>licenses by host name; elan only allows you to reserve licenses for
>groups of hosts. While in theory each system would allow us to
>restrict usage to licensed hosts, in practice there seems to be a limit
>to the number of hosts which can be included in a license data file.
>Elan broke down at the 512 char/line boundary while Frame's license
>server took several hundred host lines but not several thousand. I
>didn't try FlexLM, but indications are that it has similar limitations.
dot
