Intro

The IBM Rational License Key Server is a necessary part of most IBM Rational Solution deployments.  You install it once and it sits in the background for most of its life serving up licenses to other tools.  It rears it head every now and then to let you know it is there.  But other than that it is a harmless part of your infrastructure.  When we tried to stretch the legs of the License Server, well... Let's get to it.

Background

So, we have consultants in the filed who need to demo IBM Rational solutions to potential and current customers.  Some products have eval licenses and others don't.  There is setup required to get an image demo ready and sometimes that requires the clock starts ticking on the eval license.  Do we do the work of setting up the demo before each demo to ensure the eval license doesn't expire?  No.  Let's setup an internal license server that demo images can retrieve licenses just in time for the demo.

Solution

1. Setup the license server.
2. Make it available to the demo images.
3. Point the demo images to the license server.
4. Done!

Sounds easy, right? Nope, not quite the easy, but almost.  So, installation of the IBM Rational License Server is the easy part.  We picked a machine that would be dedicated and available to the VM demo images. Check!  Our demo images are housed in the cloud with Skytap.  We need our VM images in the cloud to communicate with our license server.  No problem, we punched a hole in our firewall so the VM images could reach out to the license server.

Next up configuring the demo images to use the license server.  Again, straight forward.  Configure the demo image to point to the 'licsrv.company.com'.  Fire up an image and test that our configuration works.  NO DICE!!  Now this is where it got very interesting.  The back enforth with IT guys troubleshooting, drawing network diagrams to make sure we didn't leave anything out of our configuration and running all sorts of network checks.  The demo machines and the license servers can communicate, but still no licenses are be checked out.

Let's back up a bit here.  The License Server is a straight forward piece of client/server software.  There is a server that runs waiting to accept license requests.  The client is configured to point to and request from the license server.  Well, on the License Server there are TWO processes that run and work together.  The lmgrd, license manager process and ibmratl, vendor process.  The lmgrd starts up automatically on port 27000 and then starts the ibmratl vendor process on a random port.  I think you can see where the problem lies.  The ibmratl vendor process and it's random port number.  Sure enough when we tracked down this process and it associated port number, punched the whole in the firewall it worked!  But we have this random port number thing we have to deal with, it changes after every restart.

The IBM Rational License Server is based on the FlexLM License Software.  And after some deep archaeology on the internet, we found some documentation on the license file syntax.  There is an option for the vendor daemon to run on a specified port like the license manager process.  So, here's the meat and potatoes.  Open you license file, rational_server_perm.dat here, C:\Program Files (x86)\IBM\RationalRLKS\common.

Find the line that says:

VENDOR ibmratl

And change it to:

VENDOR ibmratl PORT=

Restart your License Server and test that you can checkout a license.

Summary

This was not straight forward or and easy troubleshooting process.  But, now that we have this solution in place it has greatly cuts down on our license maintenance of our demo images.