Networking Autodesk Products from A to Z

JERRY MILANA: They're recording the session and I have a tendency to leave the mic off because I speak loud enough. I don't need a mic for this room, but it screws up their recording.

So we'll take a look at troubleshooting techniques, talk about them. And then Tiny's going to take over and talk about deployment images and some of the ways you can optimize that to fit your specific requirements on how your company operates and gets software to the desktop. And we'll take a peek at the new license switching utility that's built into the 2017 product.

Who's used that already? Where you can switch easily between stand-alone and network. Big improvement? Yeah. About time, huh? Yeah, I agree.

So this is pretty much-- ever since AutoCAD-- Can anybody tell me what version of AutoCAD we introduced FlexNet Licensing in? Does anybody remember?

AUDIENCE: 2005?

JERRY MILANA: No.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JERRY MILANA: No, actually we had licensing, but back then it was Elan. OK. 2000 I was the first Flex Licensed product. So it's been around in our product family for a long time now. And we chose it. And I was actually part of the committee at Autodesk that chose the FlexNet technology over other things that we were looking at. So if you don't like it, you can blame me. I'm partially at fault.

But we did it because it was an industry standard. We walked into customers that were running other software, asked them what they liked and didn't like, and what they were using, and Flex showed up in a lot of cases. So we went with Flex. And it's had its pluses and its minuses. Overall, I think, it's done pretty good. And right now we're on FlexNet Publisher 11.13.12. If you're running 2017 products, it's important that you're up to speed on the version of the product because 17, FY17 licenses leverage some of the new functionality that version of FlexNet has. And then you'll get sporadic results at 2017 products on anything earlier than that or total failure, if you're too far out of date.

One of the things to remember about this version of FlexNet, and even the Flex version that was last year, Windows 2003 is no longer supported as a platform for the license manager. And in some instances, you can have crashes if you try to use it. Although install will block it, we all know there's ways to do it. And I've gotten it on a 2003 server, but I quickly found out it crashed too. So--

Now, anybody here on what's called a Token Flex license? You probably don't know what I'm talking about if you're not, but there might be a few people that have Token Flex licenses? No? OK. Good.

Token Flex is a new licensing model that we offer to large-enterprise customers. And it's the only thing that-- this isn't true. For everybody else this is true-- our license is based on concurrent usage, which means you buy a network license for 50 people, 51st person tries to use it, it says, no, wait until somebody quits.

And we use a licensing method known as certificate, which means it's a license file, it's an ASCII file, we hand it to you. You can read it. You copy it onto your file server-- I mean, your license server-- and read the license file into the license manager.

There's another licensing model offered by Flexera and it's called, Trusted Storage. The only reason why I mentioned it, is if you go through the debug log file on your license manager you're going to see an error line in there saying, error, Trusted Storage not enabled. There's a good reason for that. Autodesk doesn't use trusted storage. Trusted Storage, by the way, is something like an activation. So you authorize license server through an activation process similar to what we use for stand-alone licensing as opposed to a certificate.

Now, it's really important that you remember this name. It's the Autodesk vendor daemon name. And the reason why is that's how we point to the Autodesk specific part of the license manager. OK. And when we do things in the options file, we set environment variables, the word ADSKFLEX comes into play. And it's provided on the Mediaset on all network licensable products. There's no extra cost, and no extra work to get it. That's right.

The components-- you got the license file itself that I just spoke about, an ASCII file that describes the license you got. Now I'll bring up a sample of that in a few moments. The license servers, what that refers to is the two executables that are in that license manager folder when you install everything-- LMGRD.exe and ADSKFLEX.exe.

LMGRD is a traffic cop. It's the first thing that starts. It figures out where the license files are, which tells it which vendor daemons to start. And in the case of Autodesk it's going to be ADSKFLEX. And ADSKFLEX actually is the guy who communicates with the actual session once the initial handshake occurs ADSKFLEX will set up a heartbeat between the license manager and the client workstation. And ADSKFLEX also is the piece that has the logic of how licenses are granted or denied when an application requests the license.

I put the actual application up here as a component because it does, it uses specific coding when you're in a network license mode that's unique to network licensing as opposed to standalone licensing.

And as far as log files go, there's two kinds of log files. One is the debug log file. It's an ASCII file. You can read it in Notepad. And the other one is what we call, a report log, and people like me, the dinosaurs, will call it an RL file. OK. An RL file slash report logs, a binary encoded, they're not readable with Notepad, you've got to use tool produced by Flexera.

And right now you've got two options and soon it's going to go down to one. The two options are, SAMreport-Lite which is a free program that-- well it wasn't free to Autodesk, it was free to you guys. Autodesk paid the predecessor of Flexera to develop that, but it's been end of lifed. You can still download it from the Autodesk site, you can still get a license file from Flexera for it, but that's going to go away soon.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JERRY MILANA: So, it still works. It works. OK. But we don't know how long. Here's what's going to happen, my prediction, this is not anything official. My guess, an update to the operating system is going to occur. Security is something is going to break this thing, and no one's going to fix it this time. OK. And that's happened several times over the years while it was supported, and it got fixed. It's not going to get fixed this time. It's been pretty firmly said, it's not going to get fixed. So when that happens, it's not going to work. Just so you know.

Your other option if you want to read report logs is FlexNet Manager for Engineering Applications. But that's a fairly expensive product that have to buy directly from Flexera. So what you're going to be left with is, finding one of those third party reporting tools that builds its own log file based on-- And they're not quite as accurate as this, but they're close. And you're pretty much going to probably have to do that, if you want to maintain reporting and don't want to spend the money on FlexNet Manager.

Take a quick look at a sample license file. And, just want to call your attention to a few of the components in it. So up here, the word, paradise, that's my server name. Next to it is, the Mac address of a fixed physical network adapter in my machine. The word server is what we call a key word. It's always uppercase. If I put, paradise in uppercase or lowercase, it has no effect. And the 27,006 actually didn't come from Autodesk. When I got the-- when I get the license file generated by Autodesk sent to me that will not be on the license file. I put that in. Does anybody know what that does?

AUDIENCE: It's the port.

JERRY MILANA: It's the port, yes. It's the LMGRD port. Now whether you fix the port or not, if you've got one thing, if you're going to do an Autodesk licensing on a server, whether you do it or not. If you only got one FlexNet vendor, you're always going to start at 27,000. You know that. So it's futile. But if you've got brand x and brand y license managers that are also being done by Flexera, then you really should be fixing the port on all those servers so that everybody starts in the same place every time.

Other pieces-- everything you see here, these in green, are what you call, keywords. And they're always going to be uppercase. And you shouldn't touch them. The port for the vendor daemon part is 2080. That will come from Autodesk. And that port is registered to the IANA. And so is, by the way, the port range of 27,000 to 27,009 is IANA registered as well. OK. So if you stay within those guidelines you've got registered ports and you shouldn't have anybody stepping on you.

Now the next piece is this word, package. Defines what is being licensed, not how many licenses you have, but what is being licensed. So a package, this particular package, is defined as including AutoCAD 2017 down to 2014. So this is a license we give to substitution customers. Who's on sub? Just about everybody? Most people. OK.

The second piece of this is how many of these packages you have. This particular example it's only a two-seat license. But this is the increment is defined, how many you got, the package defines what you have. OK.

And I want to remind you of the Autodesk new math where 5 plus 2 equals 2. And the scenario is, you have a license with five seats of AutoCAD, you call a vendor up and say, I want to buy two more seats, he doesn't know you have the five, he gets you a license files for two, you say, great, you stick it on your license server, reread the server, and all of sudden, you got less licenses than you started out with. And the reason why is, that two-seat license has a newer date than the five-seat license and since it's the same feature, the new one overrode the old one.

There's two ways to solve the problem. One is, call your vendor back and see if he can combine the assets and you get a license file for seven. And if that can't be done for whatever reason, what you can do is, get both licenses generated the same day and then they will add.

Now when you start your product up it's network licensed. Let's say, I [INAUDIBLE] network license and it's got to figure out where to go looking for a license server. The license server themselves are passive. They don't advertise themselves. They don't-- they don't speak until spoken to. So there's got to be some type of a mechanism on each client workstation to figure out where to go look for a license. I refer to the process as server resolution. And essentially it's going to look at three different places to figure out what's out there. It's going to look at a breadcrumb registry entry.

Who's familiar with a breadcrumb registry entry? Anybody? A couple. OK.

This is created by the Flexera, FlexNet API. When an application is successful in starting up the licensing system and the client writes to the registry and that client that server name has been successful. And after that it's always going to try that server to get a license. It worked last time. OK. Good and bad. We'll talk more about that in a little bit. It's going to look there. It's going to look at an environment variable if it exists on that license, on that client. ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE.

And then last, it's going to go looking for LICPATH.LIC in the executable directory of the product. And this is the actual order that it looks for things.

This is a nice cheat sheet that you can put on your troubleshooters machines. This particular slide. So that if they get a phone-- help desk call that says, I can't get a license. One of two things happened. Either, they never got to the correct server or the server turned them down for one of these reasons right here. And you'll see it recorded in the debug log file, what happened. And if you don't find anything in the debug log file of what happened, they probably never got to the server so start looking for connectivity issues.

Anybody who has heard me talk before has heard my spiel about redundant servers. I don't like them. OK. You can pick the other two, either one. There's reasons to use them. I can't think of any reason to use these unless you like headaches. OK. And the problem with it is, the way redundant servers work is, a pool of three computers basically jointly control a pool of licenses. So if you have 100 licenses, these three machines, all have an identical license file that says we're a triad and if one of us fails 100 licenses will still be used if it was 100 licenses. But if two licenses fail, you've got zero. But the real problem is, how often do servers fail? Not very often anymore. Pretty reliable. What fails?

AUDIENCE: The network.

JERRY MILANA: The network. Infrastructure. Right? Wide area networks, your vendor, somebody backhoed a fiber optic cable, or something right? Well these things are supposed to be co-located. What good is that? Where, distributed servers, yeah, if you lose a server you're going to be down a small percentage, a percentage. Now it could be a third, but you could have four or five distributed servers too. But what's really important is, these little arrows could represent thousands of miles in separation. So that if an area gets isolated there's licenses on both sides of the isolating break. That's why this works so much better in real life than this does.

And if you've got a single point of failure, if you're small firm. And you've got a file server, say, and no one works without that file server because that's where everything is put your license manager there too. It goes down, you're down anyhow.

Now that server resolution varies depending upon which licensing model you choose. If you'd have a single server, you'll have a LICPATH.LIC in every executable folder. And it's going to look something like this. And then you can modify it to show the port if you want to. The problem with this is, it's really hard for one to update anything, to touch every computer, and look for every executable folder, and update LICPATH.LIC in every one of those folders. It's a real pain.

Redundant servers basically do the same thing. You got to use a LICPATH.LIC. And here you have to use a LICPATH.LIC because of the logic that having this file with the three servers in the search path in the file not in the LICPATH.LIC-- I mean, not in the environment variable, drive certain search logic. That works with redundant servers and doesn't work very well on distributed servers. So this is the way you would look like if you were doing redundant servers. If you didn't listen to me and did redundant servers anyway, this is what it would look like.

If you got distributed servers, it's important that you don't use this model to point to multiple servers, and that you use this model. Because you need this-- the biggest problem is, if you've got redundant services it's going to ask for the first-- it's going to ask the first server for a license. If that first server says, no it's going to be, no on the other two on redundant servers because it's a joint pool. It's not going to look any further. It's going to look at the first server, get the, no, and stop. You don't want that on distributed servers because the answer might be, yes, at the next server. So when you point using the environment variable it'll continue to ask every server. That's the environment-- that's the logic we want to have enabled in a case of distributed servers.

The other thing that's nice about environment variables is, it's a lot easier to get them to the desktop. OK. So that's the real beauty of it as well. And once again, you can do it without the port, just the ASCII, and the server name or IP address. Or if you want to specify the port for faster startup time, you can 27,006 A at the server name.

So when you set environment variables at the workstation the big takeaway here is, please don't use user environment variables, use system variables. The biggest reason for it is, user variables override system variables, and they're hard update through programmatically. In other words, to essentially push out user environment variables, you can do it with Active Directory. It's not going to work in most other ways, any kind of automation. So even if you're not automating now, someday you might. And you might have a real headache on your hands.

I've been to-- actually I just did one. There was 5,000 computers involved in the thing. And about 2/3 of those computers had user environment variables. And it was time consuming, and painful.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JERRY MILANA: Sorry?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JERRY MILANA: Sure. Now if for some reason, you can't use group policies, which I think is the best way to set the environment variables, other good methods is SETX.EXE is fantastic. Who uses SETX.EXE? Nobody? OK.

SETX.EXE started coming on Windows machines with Windows 7. What makes it special is, if you use the old set command you can set the environment variable, but it was only good for that shell session. It wasn't effective for the whole computer. Using SETX it's effective for the whole computer, and it's there again when you restart the computer. So it writes it actually to the registry. So it's very powerful, very easy.

And what I do is, is I write batch files with SETX in it to do, say if I'm rolling something out, we're doing tests before we roll-- before we roll it out to the masses using group policy we want to test a dozen machines. If you do this in control panel, sure enough, one or two of those 12 machines you're testing on you're going to fumble and mistype something and you're going to wonder why they're not working. So if you do it on a batch file and you use SETX everyone is implemented correctly with the same mistype. At least you know what happened.

So the important environment variable, the most important one, is the ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE. Now the confusing part of this is, it's the same name as the breadcrumb registry entry. So if you try to manipulate environment variables and breadcrumbs directly in a registry it's easy to get crossed up and delete the wrong thing. I got another slide to talk about that a little bit more.

But essentially, I've already showed what the proper syntax for ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE variable is.

This next one, if you have sites that have slow, latent connections, and you're having either-- either the products not starting or every now and then you get a complaint, that I had to click it three times before it would start, and get a license, usually indicates that you're having latency issues. And you can set this variable. And usually you're going to set it between two and eight million. And that's two to eight seconds, translated because it's milliseconds that you're setting.

And what I advise people do is, start at two, if you're having that problem, and work your way up until the problem reliably goes away and stop. Because the higher you set that, the slower the start-up performance is. OK. And if you had three servers and you say set this-- say it took 10 seconds to do it, that would be 30 seconds before someone gets to the third server. And 30 seconds after you click something is an eternity, right? What you're going to have is your users, click it once, click it twice, click it three times. And all of sudden they're going to start popping up, right? So the other thing I always tell people is, if you can, only set this at the sites that are having the problem. Don't make this a company-wide setting. No point in making everybody else suffer.

To set an environmental control panel, you go to a system, and then you go to the Advanced tab, and then there you'll see the environment variable button. Simply create a new one or edit an existing one, put the values in, click OK. Now just make sure when you're doing all that you're not setting it up here in the user variable, you're setting it down here.

Any time I do stuff with environment variables I usually like to do a sanity check. Make sure I really did what I think I did. And a quick way to do that is, start a fresh DOS prompt as soon as you're finished doing what you thought you did. OK. So if you already had a DOS prompt open and you do this, that won't work because it doesn't reflect the current environment.

So you start a new DOS prompt, type the word, set, and then part of the variable name. Usually I just type, set space a if I want to look at ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE or set space f flex [INAUDIBLE] time out. And it will give me everything that starts with a or everything that starts with f. And there's usually about a half a dozen of both. Easy to spot what you're looking for. And it's either there and it's the value I expected or it's missing or the value is not what I expected and I react appropriately.

Usually if it's there, and it's not what I expected, it's [INAUDIBLE] set a user environment variable on that thing and it's hitting me.

Cascading is a little bit of a shell game that goes on behind the scenes when you start an Autodesk product. Has anybody had to deal with cascading issues? A few. OK.

The way this works is, I'm going to use AutoCAD as an example because AutoCAD is part of everything. When AutoCAD starts it's going to try to use the least expensive license it knows how to use, but it knows how to use lots of different licenses because it's included in lots of different product lines. So it starts looking for the most-- the cheapest thing which is AutoCAD. So it looks for an AutoCAD license, doesn't find it it, goes on to the next thing until it finds a license that it knows how to use.

There it's-- at the early years we did that. We had a couple little quirks and you had to delete a cascade info file once in a while. It's pretty well-- I think, it's been pretty well stabilized. We don't have issues with the current version. Except people call and say, how come I started AutoCAD, but I'm not using an AutoCAD I'm using an XYZ license. And there's lots of reasons why the person skipped over maybe a server that had AutoCAD license and he hit the server that didn't have the AutoCAD license, so he pulled a Design Suite license or something like that. OK. And that's what you have to expect is, this thing's going to go into a server and it's going to pull the license that it can find on that server. The cheapest one it knows how to find.

But there's another issue. And we instituted a few years after we did cascade and we and we instituted another feature called, Cascade License Sharing. What that does is, say you started AutoCAD on a machine and you did have an AutoCAD license. So AutoCAD pulled the AutoCAD license. And then you started Inventor and Inventor pulls a Design Suite license. Well, AutoCAD can use a Design Suite license. So about three minutes or so after you started Inventor AutoCAD wakes up and says, wait a minute. There's something running here and I can use that license. I'll go ahead and put the AutoCAD back. So now you got one more AutoCAD available for other people to use. And that guy is sharing the Inventor and the AutoCAD.

Now the one thing you got to realize is, once that happens when he stops using Inventor it doesn't go back and get the AutoCAD it keeps in the Design Suite license. It doesn't go back the other way. Autodesk actually tried to implement the return thing and the code got so complex and spaghetti-like, we decide for reliability not to implement it. Options file is, to me, the most powerful and important thing I'm going to talk about in this session. This is the thing that you can use to leverage and protect your investment in the software licenses.

The typical things, and this isn't a full list of what you can do is what the Options file by the way, this is what most people do with it. There's a chapter in the PDF file that gets written to your license file when you install license manager. There'll be a PDF in that folder along with LMGRD or ADSKFLEX and everything. So I would suggest that you read that chapter on the Options file. And you might find-- you might be inspired or spot a feature or functionality that you've been trying to figure out how to implement in your environment. Something I didn't think about talking about here because I'm trying to go after the stuff that most people use.

So report log creation, that's that RL file I talked about. The only way to get that RL file is to turn it on in the Options file. And borrowing controls-- and you control borrowing in two ways. You can control how long people can borrow, and who can borrow. How long as the default borrow period in Autodesk products? Anyway know? Six months.

So George borrows his license for six months, walks out the door, and drops his laptop in the river. There's no administrative way of getting that license back. License either come back because they expire or because someone returned them early. George is not returning his early. OK. So you want to put as short a leash on that borrow as you can.

The value that I found works for most companies the best is 10 days. 10 days allows you to borrow a license on a Friday, you use it that weekend, the entire week following, and the weekend after that, before you're back in your office on Monday. So basically accommodates a full week business trip without worrying about renewing it. If the person is going to be gone longer than that, the chances are most users, there'll be somewhere where they can VPN and renew their borrow. So they might not like doing that, but most cases it's a feasible thing to do.

And if someone needs borrows for months and if they're running 2017 product, what I would do is, I would go out and buy a few standalone licenses, park the [INAUDIBLE] to put up a license utility, and when someone needs to go out in the field for months, he grabs one of those. He uses that License Switcher and he switches from stand alone to-- from network to stand alone. And when he comes back he uses the portable license utility, returns his license to that-- the PLU and goes back to network mode. That's a lot more effective way of handling that guy, that education person that's gone for months.

Now I find very few companies where there's any kind of real number of people who are gone months at a time that need a borrowed license. So it's usually that education, one or two people who have this really strange job. And I think that's the best way to handle it.

Idle license recovery is, in my opinion, the other big-- in fact, it's probably the most important thing you can do. And I'm still amazed after all these years I still walk into a lot of accounts and find it not set. And nobody should not be setting that. Everybody should set this. There's two reasons-- two things it protects you from. If George goes out for a martini lunch, and once he's gone for 90 minutes the license management is saying, you know, George has not been doing anything for 90 minutes, I'm going to take his license away and put it back in the pool. Now if he comes back and moves his mouse the application is in the background is going to try and get the license back. And if there's a license available, George didn't even know he lost it. It's totally transparent to him. If you're out of licenses, one of two things are going to happen. It's going to say, goodbye, if he saved his work before he left. Or it's going to get, do you want to save you work, yes, or no, if you didn't save. OK. They don't make that mistake more than once or twice.

AUDIENCE: Can I ask a Question?

JERRY MILANA: Real-- Yeah, real quick one.

AUDIENCE: I've been getting a, you have six minutes to save your work--

JERRY MILANA: No, it's not. It's not.

AUDIENCE: OK.

JERRY MILANA: So we'll talk about that one, probably offline, OK?

The other thing that you're saving yourself from though, besides Georges martini lunch, and that's a biggie too because it's not just a martini lunch, it's when George goes home and leaves AutoCAD running, right? But the other thing it protects us-- George is so excited he's going on that martini lunch, he runs out of his cubicle, he trips over his network cord, and he doesn't notice he pulled it out of the wall and now that session is zombied.

When's that license going to free up if you don't set it's idle time out? Anybody know? No? The next time you stop and start the license manager is when that will clear. OK. That-- you don't want that. That's money out the door. If you set idle time out in 90 minutes it's going to say, I haven't seen any activity on this, he's probably out at martini lunch, but it could be something else like that, and it pulls the license back into the server. OK. That's why it's so important that you really have to do this.

I walk into accounts, large accounts, and they haven't set it. And I go, look at this, and I show them how many licenses are in use. I set that thing and I said, let's take a 15 minute walk. And it'll go-- and it'll actually, when you do that, it'll scrub all the ones that already hit that-- that are past the 90 minutes. We'll walk back and I'll recover, like, 30 licenses for them. And I just look at them, and I said, I just paid for my trip, you know. It's like everything else is bonus. So it's really important that you do this. And I've really seen very few accounts where I've gone in, that's not set, set it and not recovered a few licenses right away.

So I've already said this so I'm not going to do anymore. I'm just going to point out the syntax. It's the time out all is what you use. It's time out all in upper case and then the value. And the value is in seconds. So what I normally set this thing to, unless someone really wants something different, is time out at all at 5,400 seconds, which is 90 minutes.

This slide, you can look at it later. It's available to downloads. I'm not going to spend too much time on it. Only to bring to your attention that if you've got negatives and positives in your Options file-- So George is in a group that say, he's in a reserve group for a particular feature, but he's also in an exclude group for the same feature. Because he happen to just be included in groups. And he ended up in both of those groups. Well, you think you reserved a license for George and George is not going to be able to get the license because the exclude will win over the reserve. OK. Careful with that.

And, by the way, that's when you-- that cheat sheet I told you that someone should start looking through that cheat sheet when someone says they can't get a license. That activity, it will actually say in the debug log file, George didn't get a license because his name was in that exclude list.

Report log creation. If you're going to use a report log for licensing and a lot of people who don't even use the Flexera tools to decode them, they record report logs only because it's a source of truth if you ever had to figure out what happened somewhere along the line. OK. If you do it, this is the syntax. Now the only thing I recommend is, when you put that report log file name in, if there's spaces in the path put quote marks around it. Earlier versions of FlexNet actually required it. It would crash if you didn't do it. But newer versions, it just doesn't work right once in awhile. There's some little quirks. So I really recommend putting it in quotes.

And the plus sign is required. What does a plus sign do? Who knows?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] It depends, whatever--

JERRY MILANA: It depends on when you restart rather than starting a brand new report log. So if you don't put that plus sign in, it's basically going to blow the old report log away every time you stop and start the license manager.

So here's a little quick sample. This Options file creates the report log. And I create a group called, ACD borrow, and put three people in it. And then I say, include borrow AutoCAD 2015 and for this group ACAD borrow. When I type that line in, put it in, now only people who belong to that group can borrow AutoCAD 2015. If you're outside of that group, you don't get to borrow.

What a lot of companies do, is they write these rules against every feature in their license file and you have to have a business reason why you need to be able to borrow to get on that list. OK. Once again, borrowed licenses are expensive licenses. You're not sharing them anymore, and that's the whole point of network licensing. Treat it with a good deal of scrutiny on how you implement that.

The next one is, max borrow hours. So if you happen to be in this ACAD borrow group, now it cuts you off at 10 days. You can only borrow for 240 hours, 10 days. That's it.

And in this next example I wanted to limit, by geography, who could get the things. So I use an exclude all because I wanted to keep people out of this particular internet range, out of my server. OK. And that's done a lot by people who have global issues because they've got a network where anybody can reach anything. But they got license servers that are restricted on where they're supposed to-- the license is supposed to be used. So to protect their compliance status they simply exclude all the regions that are not eligible to use that license.

You could also use the reverse logic. Instead of doing an exclude and doing a bunch of internet ranges, you can do an include all of ranges and that would allow only the people in those stated ranges to run. So you can either subtract or minus. Don't do both. Do excludes or includes.

Group case and sensitive-- if you're going to start creating groups and you've got Windows, and most of us are running Windows environments, there's no way for me to control whether Mary Jones signs in is lowercase Jones m or uppercase J and the rest lowercase or, god knows, what other combination of upper and lower case. And if you don't set that group case insensitive to on, the license manager evaluates the login name exactly as it was typed. So every different combination is a different login name to the license manager if you don't set this. And, therefore, you'd have to write a whole bunch more names in that thing, every possible combination of Jones M. To simply set group case insensitive to, on, and it's all evaluated the same. Basically, it forces everything to lower case, in this logic.

And the time out all which I just gave you-- I'll shut up about time out all now. SAMreport-Lite, once again, it's gone, basically. You could still get it for now, but it's not going to be around very long. I used to have, when I taught this class in the past I've had a bunch of slides on it. The only thing I'm going to tell you now is, there is a download page for it if you do a search of SAMreport-Lite on Autodesk.com, it'll bring to bring you to a page where you can download it and get instructions on how to install it and get it licensed. So if you want it, get it. But, like I say, if it stops working for one reason or another beyond something that you did to set it up, it's probably not going to happen anymore.

The Brand-X and Brand-Y licensing alongside Autodesk, I kind of started already talking about that. Where the big thing is, is you want to set that port in the server line of your license file. And you want to do that not just for Autodesk, but for Brand-X and Brand-Y as well. And careful, some Brand-X and Brand-Y products actually set the port already for you. And that's another reason why you should be setting everybody, so that no one is stepping on anything in the long run. OK. If you're all by yourself, you don't have to worry about this. If it's only just AutoCAD-- Autodesk licenses.

So here's a license switch method. For any of you who hasn't tried this in 2017, it's really kind of cool. You'll simply go to the help about and select, About AutoCAD 2017 and click on the Manage License button, which brings you up here. And you click on, Change License Type and you get this confirmation dialog box, here. And when you click, Confirm on this, it doesn't switch the license at this point, it closes the application. So before you get here, save your work and be prepared to exit and re-enter.

Then when the product exits, you click on the icon to start the product again, you get this dialog. So you can either go back to your network license or you can enter a serial number of one of your stand alone licenses as long as it's activatable either through the portable license utility or to a license that you have, then you can use your stand alone license. OK. Pretty neat, huh?

License Borrowing, we've already talked a little bit, quite a bit about it, so I'm not going spend a lot of time on this thing. The only thing is, is it's not a standalone license, it's borrowed network license. It's a very expensive license that this person is walking around with.

And I'll remind you one more time, I get this question all the time. There's no administrative method of recalling the license. People see on LM tools-- you see that, Return Borrowed License Early. That's not for the clients. That's, if you had that running on your desktop, application desktop, and you wanted to return a license early from that desktop, that's what that, Return License Early, is for. And the reason why is, it's the history of how that got developed in Flexera. Wow, someone said, right? Yeah.

When Flexera first developed licensing that's how they expected us, Autodesk, to deliver licensing-- borrowing to the customer. They said, oh, yeah, just give everybody a copy of LM tools. And they click on that, and then they run their application, get borrow.

And once again, I was pretty involved in the evolution of FLEXlm licensing and in Autodesk. And I was the first guy, I started screaming, that's not going to work. Because, Henry can not only borrow a license, he can shut the server down, and god knows what else, right? And there's going to be a Henry in your organization that is going to do that. At least most organizations, it's going to do that. So we screamed, bloody murder and if you remember, we had a license borrowing tool in the early-- the first year that we did borrowing. And then after that we got end-product borrowing.

But to support those legacy applications that Borrowing tab is still in LM tools. And it still confuses people and they call us up, how do I use that to get a license back from somebody? You don't.

Borrowing procedure is pretty easy. It's changed a little bit now because we changed our UI on the licensing dialog box. But, essentially, it's the same thing. You'll use the help about, click on, manage Licensing, hit the Borrow button. It's the same thing. And, by the way, when Henry says he didn't know he had a license borrowed, he's staring at this balloon every time he starts the product.

AUDIENCE: A lot of users don't pay attention to that.

JERRY MILANA: Yeah. At least they say they don't. And then as far as looking at the license information dialogue, you'll see it's borrow, and once it's been borrowed you got to return. Another thing that's a telltale sign is, in this particular case this was an expiring license, so it says it's an extendable license. And over here, if this was a permanent license it would have-- it would say, license style, permanent and there would be no expiration date. Over here, it would say a permanent license, but you'd have an expiration date, clear indicator that you got a borrowed license.

So that dialogue Henry didn't see, he can click on it, and return his license very easily. Or he can go back through the same dialog sequence that he did to borrow it to begin with. One way or the other, if he managed to borrow it, he should be able to know how to return it.

And you can tell if he's got a license borrowed by doing an LM stat and looking for the Linger Flag. If it says, Linger it means it's borrowed. Now there are instances when it's not a borrowed license, but a different kind of a check out with Brand-X and Brand-Y, some Brand-X and Brand-Y vendors. But with Autodesk, if you see a Linger Flag, it's absolutely 100% a borrowed license.

Now can anybody tell me what these numbers are? Oh, I got it up on the screen. [INAUDIBLE] I blew it. This year I went ahead and put the answers so I can't quiz you guys. So if you want to figure out when it's coming back or anything you can do some arithmetic on these two numbers. The first number is how long it was borrowed for, and the second number is how long the borrow-- of the borrow is left.

Quick run through on how to configure the License Manager. The important piece in this slide is, remember to click, this. If you don't, and if there's an LM_LICENSE_FILE variable or an ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE variable LM tools will not just pick up the local system, but anything that's in that variable as well. And it's a little tricky to figure out which server you're working on in that case. And I've seen people bring servers down and delete the wrong services and all kinds of nasty things. So I always make sure that-- I always, I never run LM tools remote. And I never run it without that checked. It's just not worth the embarrassment.

The other thing to know is, on Flex we authenticate Autodesk authenticates to the Mac address on your machine. So you better pick one that's not going to change when you reboot. If it's a bare metal machine, it's pretty easy doing LM-- IPCONFIG/all and look for something that is a physical network adapter. And select it. It doesn't matter even if it's active or not just as long as there's a physical network adapter. If IPCONFIG/all can see it, so can the license manager. You just don't want it to change.