License file format

A colleague and I were discussing this today, and we've not seen this with Cadence tools (and can't really see how it would work). I have seen with other (non-Cadence) tools which use FlexLM that this is supported and works for single-user applications where there's no need for a license server, but never with our tools. There is (apparently) support for CDS_LIC_FILE to point to a directory of files and then these are concatenated, with the server/daemon being in one of the files - but I'm not aware of that being used in practice.

Is $LM_LICENSE_FILE being set too? Maybe that is being set to a complete license file with the server/daemon lines or to the port@hostname format and that's being used instead and the (malformed) CDS_LIC_FILE is being ignored? That certainly works (it's much slower though, because it has to parse through the file looking for the server information, because we need that there and the USE_SERVER line too).

Andrew

Hi Mr. Andrew, thanks for keeping the community alive.

Both $CDS_LIC_FILE and $LM_LICENSE_FILE variables are pointing to the same license.dat file. I don’t find any HOSTID, EXPIRE DATE and NO OF SEATS in the license file, which makes me a little suspicious about the genuineness of the tools.
Can I conclude that the tools are not genuine?

There is one other mechanism that might be in use here, but I don't see it widely used (I used to set this up myself in the past before I worked for Cadence, but that was in the era of a single common release stream which incorporated all Cadence tools; it makes less sense nowadays). Anyway, assuming that it's Virtuoso you are using (you didn't say which tools), you'd locate the installation (in the UNIX terminal, type "cds_root virtuoso") and then under that path there is a <ICinstDir>/share/license directory. You can set up a clients file in that directory which tells the software where to find the licenses. More information is in <ICinstDir>/doc/license/license.pdf

If it's not this, you should contact customer support (use the Case menu to submit a case after logging in). Something is clearly wrong in your setup anyway. At the very least you should speak with whoever is responsible for your software installation.

Andrew

The Cadence tool is Virtuoso (IC618). I checked the share/license folder and I can see only the default sample files, not an actual license file. Since this is one of the client logins I happened to get access to, I tried to explore the setup. Usually I understand how the licensing is configured, but this one is very different from what I have learned.
I will inform the client about this.