Recently I wrote about the new licensing options we have with WITNESS having integrated the Reprise license manager.

A few weeks back I meet with some of our resellers in Dublin and demonstrated these new licensing options. One question that kept coming up was “how to I prevent certain users from checking out licenses”.

To recap, the Reprise License Manager is a license server that manages a central pool of WITNESS licenses. A license is requested from the license server as each users starts WITNESS. There is also a mechanism called “roaming” that allows a WITNESS license to be checkout for a period of time allowing a computer  to disconnect from the network while still being able to run WITNESS.

This is a great feature but soon becomes an issue if every user “roams” a license. The result is license starvation!

To prevent such a situation there are two approaches that can be taken 

1. Don’t allow any roaming capability with the license. This can be set on our side when creating a license. You simply need to tell us!
2. Restrict the users that can “roam” using a RLM options file (lanner.opt).

The RLM options file allows access control over various administration commands. Some of these include the ability to restrict users that can “roam” licenses. Options are provided to either allow (INCLUDEALL_ROAM) or disallow (EXCLUDEALL_ROAM) roaming capability. Additionally, options are provided to create groups of users (GROUP) or hosts (HOST_GROUP). More information on this can be found in the Reprise License Server End-User Manual, accessible from the web administration console:

To restrict users from being able to “roam” using an options file you simply create a lanner.opt file in the installation folder and add the appropriate inclusion or exclusion commands.

Steps

• Locate the WITNESS Reprise License Manager installation folder. The default location is %ProgramFiles%\WITNESS Reprise LM.
• Create a text file in the installation folder called lanner.opt, using notepad or some other editor. The file named lanner.opt is name of the options file required our license demon.
• Enter the appropriate command to restrict users, for example:

• Save the file and execute the Re-read/Restart Servers command from the Reprise License Server Administration console: 

The structure of the INCLUDEALL_ROAM is:

   INCLUDEALL_ROAM [user|host|group|host_group|internet|project] who.

The INCLUDEALL_ROAM line allows usage of roaming by a particular user, host, group, host_group, IP address, or project. Anyone not on the INCLUDEALL_ROAM list is not allowed to set up roaming for any license.

Similarly there is an EXCLUDEALL_ROAM command.