Laggy network gives the License Finder Dialog!

This one has been coming up more often, so now it's on my radar as being a frequent fix.

When you run an Autodesk Network program, it makes a quick request to the license manager machine for a license/feature code.  If it doesn't hear back fairly quickly you'll receive the license finder dialog.  "A valid license could not be obtained..." yada yada yada...

So, if you ping the server from that machine and the replies are a bit slow, say greater than 4 milliseconds, I'd try setting a FLEXLM_TIMEOUT System Variable on the workstation/client machine.

To set the FLEXLM_TIMEOUT variable on Windows 7:

1. Select "System" in Control Panel
2. Click the "Advanced system settings" on the left sidebar menu
3.  Click the "Environment Variables" button at the bottom of the Advanced tab of the System Properties window.
4. Click "New..." under the System Variables section.
5. Add the new variable name FLEXLM_TIMEOUT"
6. Add the new Variable value:  3000000 
         Note: I start at 3 million and test it, work your way down to 1 million if you can.
   
   
7. Click Ok and Click OK again to get out of the Windows Environment Variables dialogs.
8. Now test it.

 

1 million means to wait 1 additional second before you give up hearing back from the license manager.  I don't go over 5 million, this also works in redundant and distributed as well as single server licensing environments.   If you're also using the ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE variable with multiple servers the program will wait much longer before giving the license finder dialog (20+ minutes in one case I had) because it's waiting extra time for each server listed in the ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE variable.  This may not be desirable and is why I keep it down under 3 million if possible.

 

Comments

[Mike Burke]

Hi, we used to have it set to 1000000 (six zeros) for years until recently when we started to get a lot of timeout issues. While researching the problem on the web, I checked out a few sites including ones like IBM that use Flex licence software. They recommended a value of 20000000 (seven zeros) http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21508092

I then looked at the Autodesk knowledge article on this subject to verify it was six zeros, but they recommend starting with 10000000 (seven zeros)! http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=7574782&linkID=9240617

So I changed it to the seven zeros 10000000 and our timeout problem has been fixed.