License

This program is licensed under the terms of GNU Public License. You can read it at
https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

or you can find a file LICENSE in this directory with a plain text copy of it.

Thanks

This package would be impossible if it weren't for these software project

• PHP and PHP's PEAR classes - a marvelous scripting language http://www.php.net/

• PHP-Diagram class - simple diagramming class http://www.tuxxland.de/php/cdiagram

What this program does:

• Shows the health of a license server or a group of them

• Check which licenses are being used and who is currently using them

• Get a listing of licenses, their expiration days and number of days to expiration

• E-mail alert of licenses that will expire within certain time period ie. within next 10 days.

• Monitors server utilization

Warning:

There is no warranty on this package. I wrote this scripts to help myself keep tabs on my FlexLM servers. I am not a FlexLM developer and base my scripts on using the publicly available commands such as lmstat, lmdiag so this may not work for you.

Please do not run these scripts on a publicly available Internet server because phplicensewatcher has not been audited to make sure it is secure. It likely isn't. You have been warned.

Limitations:

Currently only FlexLM servers are supported but in the future a wider array of license servers may be supported. A very basic LUM (License use mangagement) support was added on 2005-10-31.

Requirements:

• PHP enabled web server (most Linux distributions come with Apache and PHP installed)

• FlexLM lmutil (lmutil.exe on Windows) binaries are shipped with the commercial software which uses FlexLM licensing.

  You don't have to run this on the same machine that you are running the web server on. My license server runs on Solaris and I use a Linux box with Linux lmstat binary to query it remotely.

Basic Install process

I assume you already unpacked this archive to a directory ie. phplicensewatcher. All you have to do now is modify the values in config.php. Config.php contains comments on and then point your browser to

http://example.com/phplicensewatcher/

(of course replace example.com with the name
of your server and the location where you installed it. This will enable only basic options such as displaying the list of features, current usage. If you need options such as email alerts you have to follow the extended install process

Webinterface for configuration:

There is also a Webinterface, point your browser to http://example.com/phplicensewatcher/config/ to use it.

Extended Install process

I consider all of the extended install options to be for Administrators only. To access them please go to

http://example.com/phplicensewatcher/admin.php

License Alerts e-mail

This is probably the most important part of managing licenses :-). Being notified when licenses are due to expire. E-mails come as HTML mail since I wanted to use tables and colors.

Installation

The way I use it is to run license_alert.php report every night at 2 a.m. This report will query all specified license servers and figure out which licenses are due to expire. There are two ways to run license_alert.php script. You can use PHP interpreter directly if you have it installed in on your machine ie. RedHat distributes php interpreter as php-*.rpm packages. You can then have one of the following entries in your crontab

0 2 * * * php /var/www/html/phplicensewatcher/license_alert.php >> /dev/null

The other way to invoke it is to use wget which is a web retrieval tool. You can also use curl if you prefer that

0 2 * * * wget -O - http://example.com/phplicensewatcher/license_alert.php >> /dev/null

License utilization

In order to evaluate license utilization at your site you need to start collecting data usage statistics. PHPLicensewatcher does this by querying the license server periodically and storing the data in a SQL database. For example I have a cron job that queries the FlexLM server every 15 minutes.

In the config.php you would specify which keys you are interested in monitoring and that is what will show up on the Utilization page.

Limitation: Generate graph has a number of different limitations which I will document at some later date. One of the biggest ones is that the X-scale is dependent on values being consecutive ie. it will start plotting values from time 0 no matter when you started recording values so once you install it it will appear that you started logging since midnight. You will have “realistic” usage only after that day. Sorry.

Installation

DB setup

First you have to decide where you are going to store the database files. I use mysql. To create my own database as mySQL administrator I entered

mysqladmin create licenses

Create a user or use an existing user and then as such execute something along these lines

mysql -f licenses < phplicensewatcher.sql

This will create appropriate SQL. You should also create a database user ie. Username=nobody password=nopasswd. To do that type

mysql mysql  
grant select,insert on licenses.* to nobody@”localhost” identified by 'nopasswd';

Then edit config.php to suit your site.

Crontab setup

Last but not least is to set up data collection crontabs. There are two scripts that need to be executed ie. license_util.php and license_cache.php.

• license_util.php is used to get current license usage. It should be run periodically throughout the day ie. every 15 minutes.

• license_cache.php stores the total number of available licenses on particular day. This script is necessary because you may have temporary keys that may expire on a particular day and you want to capture that. It should be run once a day preferably soon after the midnight after which license server should invalidate all the expired keys.

My crontab looks like this

0,15,30,45 * * * * wget -O - http://example.com/phplicensewatcher/license_util.php >> /dev/null  
15 0 * * *  wget -O - http://example.com/phplicensewatcher/license_cache.php >> /dev/null

License denials / per user usage

An important metric in evaluating your licenses is license denials ie. how many people were denied access to a certain feature because we were out of licenses. To do that we have to analyze FlexLM logs. FlexLM logs are enabled during FlexLM start up. For example we start our FlexLM servers with following options

su nobody -c '/tools/lmgrd -l /usr/tmp/27000-at-licenserv -c /tools/license/license.dat'

This will create /usr/tmp/27000-at-licenserv which will contain information such as when the license has been checked out, when it was checked in plus any time a license has been denied ie.

16:01:20 (daemond) DENIED: "viewer" jack@server  (Licensed number of users already reached (-4,342))

We want to capture this information since a high number of denials would indicate that we should consider getting additional licenses since a lot of people are being denied access.

Installation

If you haven't set up databases for license utilization please follow DB setup instructions under License utilization. Phplicensewatcher.sql creates the table structure necessary for Denials as well.

Crontab setup

FlexLM logs can be very large so it may take a long time to analyze them. I run the analysis scripts around 2 a.m. every morning. To run them put something like this in your crontab

0 2 * * *  wget -O - http://example.com/phplicensewatcher/parselog.php >> /dev/null

You are done now.

Questions, Comments, Patches

Please address any questions, comments or patches to

Wolfgang Dautermann dauti@users.sourceforge.net