( ESNUG 234 Item 2 ) ---------------------------------------------- [3/14/96]
From: [ Not A Sun Employee ]
Subject: How To Temporarily Borrow Synopsys Keys From Within Your Company
John, Please keep me ANONYMOUS.
Suppose your company has both East coast and West coast offices like, for
example, Sun Microsystems. The people on the West coast won't get in
until at least 11:00 East coast time, and the people on the East coast
(officially) go home at 2:00 to 4:00 West coast time. The license keys are
running 24 hours/day, why not temporarily use the ones from the other office
while they aren't in the office?
For discussion's sake, let's assume you're an east coast engineer who wants
to use those west coast licenses. All you need is:
1) Network access to the machine running the license manager at the west
coast site -- just the ability to "ping" it directly is all you need.
2) A copy of the west coast site's license file. (It doesn't have to be
current, just not expired).
To make the west coast remote machine look local to your east coast site,
modify your /etc/hosts with the an entry which looks like the following:
123.12.1.12 sunwest
where 123.12.1.12 is the "dotted quad" of the remote license server, and
"sunwest" is the name of the machine in the "SERVER" line in the of the
copied license file. You can get this number by "telnet"ing to the west
coast remote machine.
If your site supports network aliases then you can modify /etc/aliases with:
sunwest: sunwest.sun.com
Where "sunwest.sun.com" is the full name of the remote west coast license
server. On a local network you may not need the ".sun.com" portion.
To test from the east coast, do the following:
>/usr/etc/ping sunwest
and if you get "sunwest is alive" you are done.
Now, setup your environment for Synopsys as usual, to your current favorite
version of Synopsys, then do the following:
setenv SYNOPSYS_KEY_FILE /tools/synopsys/license/key.westcoast
or
setenv LM_LICENSE_FILE /tools/synopsys/license/key.westcoast
Either will work. The path must be explicit, or the full path to the license
file from the other site on YOUR machines. This will override your license
file, and suddenly you will be using the license from the west coast.
Note, the "version" in the remote key file must be at least the version you
are running. You can't run 3.4 with a 3.3 license file.
Questions: IS THIS LEGAL?!!
Yes. As long as the license agreement says "Your company" and not "This
site, Your company" it is legal. You still have a set number of licenses,
you are just using them more effectively. Remember, this is a FEATURE of
FlexLM, not a bug. Also, some license agreements have things written into
them which expressly forbid doing this (Cadence Verilog is one of them).
WILL THIS WORK WITH TOOLS OTHER THAN SYNOPSYS?
Yes. Just modify LM_LICENSE_FILE to point to the correct license file for
the correct tool after setting up your environment to run it.
WILL I GET A PERFORMANCE HIT?
No. Traffic to the license server is very low, and you will be running
your local version of Synopsys. If the link to the west coast goes
down Synopsys will suspend execution until it comes back though.
Also, remember that you will only have these licenses *temporarily* -- when
the west coast "wakes up" and finds all their licences being used, they'll
probably unilaterally kill your processes without warning!
- [ Not A Sun Employee ]
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