2.6 Generate license information

Most of the programs that form the ADF package require a license file to run. This file contains information about your machine, the version(s) of the package for which you have a license, and the end date of your license.

If you are a trial user, then you should have already received a valid 'demo' license file by e-mail. If you install ADF from a CD, then you should be able to find a demo license file on the CD. In most other cases you will receive a host-locked license file from SCM, but SCM first needs to get some information from you about your machines. You can generate this information by running a program from the package on all machines where ADF is installed as follows:

$ADFBIN/dirac check

This will show some basic information about your license such as the date until which it is valid and list of packages it is valid for with their respective version numbers. It will also show you up to how many processes can be in an ADF parallel job. An explanatory error message will be printed if there is no valid license found. After that, information about the computer's ID is displayed. This information is necessary for SCM to generate a license file for this particular computer. To obtain only the information needed for generating license file you can use the following command:

$ADFBIN/dirac info

Thus, in order to obtain a license file it is sufficient to send to license@scm.com output of the $ADFBIN/dirac info command but in case of problems with the license one should send output of the $ADFBIN/dirac check command together with the support request.

After receiving the machine ID(s) SCM will prepare a license file matching your license conditions and e-mail it to you with instructions on how to install it.

After receiving a license file you will need to save it to an appropriate location on your computer (usually in the directory where you installed ADF) and set the environment variable $SCMLICENSE pointing to the file. For example, if you saved the license file named license.txt in /opt/ADF then SCMLICENSE must be set to /opt/ADF/license.txt. Add the SCMLICENSE definition to your login script.

Ensure that permissions on the license file allow read access for everyone who is going to run ADF.

After installing the license you should make sure everything is fine by running:

$ADFBIN/dirac check

This will produce the output similar to the following:

Checked: /home/yakovlev/license

License termination date (mm/dd/yyyy):  7/10/2009

According to it, you are allowed to run:

   ADF version  2008.99
  BAND version  2008.99
ADFGUI version  2008.99
BANDGUI version  2008.99
   GUI version  2008.99
 Utils version  2008.99
   NBO version  2008.99
   CRS version  2008.99

Number of procs you are allowed to use for:

ADF  :     128 procs
BAND :     128 procs

=====================================================
release: 2008.01
:chem.vu.nl:
:Linuxmycomputer00:15:17:76:EC:5C:
ncores :           4
=====================================================
LICENCE INFO READY

Please refer to ADF for Windows release notes for details on how to obtain the license information under Windows.

Corrupted License File

You may find that, after having installed the license file, the program still does not run and prints a message "LICENSE CORRUPT". There are a few possible causes. To explain how this error may come about, and how you overcome it, a few words on license files.

Each license file consists of pairs of lines. The first of each pair is text that states in a human-readable format a couple of typical aspects: A 'feature' that you are allowed to use (for instance 'ADF'), the expiration date, a (maximum) release (version) number of the software and so on. The second line contains the same information in encrypted format: a long string of characters that appear to make little sense. The program reads the license file and checks, with its internal encrypting formulas, that the two lines match. If not, it stops and prints a "LICENSE CORRUPT" message.

So, there are two common reasons why this may happen:

1. You are using a license file for a version of the software other than your executables correspond to. Newer (major) releases may use a different encryption, so that the match in old license files is not recognized anymore. In particular, the "LICENSE CORRUPT" error will arise if you run ADF1999 (or later) with a license file that was generated for ADF2.3 (or earlier). Verify that your license file and executable belong to the same major release.

2. The license file as it has been created has been modified in some way. Sometimes, people inspect it and 'clean it up' a little bit, for instance by removing 'redundant spaces', or by making some other 'improvements'. Any such modification will break the encryption match and lead to the "LICENSE CORRUPT" error. Sometimes the reason lies in the mailing system: if the file contains long lines the mailer may break them into shorter lines. To verify (and correct) this open the license file in a text editor and see if it really consists of pairs of lines as described above. If not, re-unify the broken lines and try again.

You can use the fixlic utility to try to fix this automatically. Please be aware that the fixlic utility will try to fix the file pointed to by the $SCMLICENSE environment variable and replace it with the fixed copy. Thus, you need to make a backup of your license file first and you need to have write permissions for it.

cp $SCMLICENSE $SCMLICENSE.backup
$ADFBIN/fixlic