Introduction

This week I’m in Switzerland. helping a customer to install and use Rhapsody and a lot of other tools. Switzerland is cool, very nice to travel to because of the beautiful landscape. Not nice to travel to because everything is soooo expensive… For the price of a  normal meal I can feed my entire family in Germany… This time I was lucky, finding a very nice and quit hotel where the food was delicious and not even that expensive (Well not for Switzerland…) I was also lucky with picking up my rental car: a free upgrade… OK, not a Merc, but the BMW 420D X-Drive was a nice car. And the snow on the last day was a piece of cake with the 4-wheel drive and the winter tires.

Back to work

As I have written before, it is not easy to install all tools in a way that everything works. Careful planning is required here.

Willert RXF License

The RXF does not have a license. There are 2 types of customers: One that is willing to pay and one that will never pay for software. License mechanisms are only there to annoy the first type: People that have paid for software and are legally entitled to use it.
The second type tries to hack it and if that is not possible: they will use other software.
We at Willert have rather that people steal our software then that they buy it from our competitors.

IBM Rhapsody license

IBM uses the so-called Flexible License Manage (Flex-LM), in spite of the name it is a very inflexible piece of software. Many things can go wrong there. We literally spend hours to get the stuff running sometimes.

Steady or Floating?

There are many different license types for Rhapsody depending on how you use the software and what version you use.

  • AU – Authorized User
  • FL – Floating User

The difference between these 2 is that an AU License is for a named person. This has to be the same person, always! (You can, of course, move the license internally but not on an hourly basis)
An FL can be used by multiple persons that not even have to be on the same location just not on the same time. Theoretically, if you have sites all over the world, you can have 3 people working a full day with same license. IBM allows that, Telelogic had a special (more expensive) license for that.
NOTE: IBM requires you to have a list available with the licenses you use and the names of the actual user! They are entitled to check that. (This is one of the points in the license agreement that you have not read)

Server, Locally or Dongle?

Flex-LM works with a license file. There are parts built into the software that uses it to check the file and determine if you are allowed to start it.

  • Server, you have a server that is reachable for everyone in the company (Yes that can be an international server)
  • Locally Server, you have the Flex-LM server on your local machine
  • Locally license file, there is no Flex-LM server, Rhapsody will read and decode the license file itself. The license file uses your network cards MAC address as a “key”.
  • Locally Dongle, you have a license file that uses the Dongle “ID” as a “key”

For the Server (local or remote) you need to install the Flex-LM key Manager

Have I already told you that I hate Windows?

I do. Really. It is such a @#$%^&*( OS. The fact that you must distinguish between 32-Bit and 64-Bit is already a pain not to mention everything else.
So for the dongle driver you need to check if you have 32- or 64-Bit. Also it seems to be a bit of a problem when you have the latest Windows 10 version. (although it seems to be Windows Type, (Home, Pro, ultimate, etc) dependant.
You can download your driver here.

OK. I did all that. It doesn’t work. Now what?

First: Don’t get mad or sad, this is not abnormal… Here are some pointers where you can start to get stuff running:

  • As always: You can ask us. We help you.
  • You can ask google. You’ll be surprised what google knows when you type in your exact error message.
  • READ the error message. Flex-LM mostly says exactly what the problem is.
  • find your lmtools.exe program, it helps you finding what is wronglmtoolsMain
  • There is an environment variable TELELOGIC_LICENSE_FILE that points to license files or paths where license files are (The latter only finds “license.lic” files). Unfortunately this is not the only source for locations, there is also:
  • A Registry Entry: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\FLEXlm License Manager also has a Field “TELELOGIC_LICENSE_FILE” that contains the path information. If you want to delete incorrect entries you have to do it here as well… Flex-LM updates this entry when you add new paths to the Environment Variable but does not delete any when you change the Env Var again…
  • Check the number of your Dongle (Do this also physically on the Dongle itself) in the lmtools tab: “System Setting” and in the license file.
  • Any change in your system, OS update or Rhapsody update can influence the working of your license. beware of that. So if your license does not work anymore, try to check if something happens to the OS or other software (Check logs files)
  • Do you have a new network card? Most licenses work with your MAC address. Sometimes you can change the MAC address of your network card. But you can ask for a new license, IBM will give you one (Not every week of course…)

So. I hope this helps a little bit!

Happy modeling with Rhapsody!

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)