Librarian A Multi-User License Manager

Abstract

A common problem in network administration is that there are often more workstations on a network than there are available licensed copies of the various software products. The purpose of the software described herein is to provide the tools necessary to manage and enforce software licensing agreements by insuring that no more that the licensed number of copies of any given package are in operation concurrently on a network. In addition, these tools collect usage statistics so that an administrator can determine where, when, and how many copies of each product are used. This type of information can prove invaluable in management and purchase decisions. This software was designed to meet the following goals: It should allow management of software products without modification tothose products. The tools allow a centralized license manager to bequeried before a product is run. Typically this is done through menu system or a shell script. It should run on systems that support public domain network protocols such as TCP/IP and Remote Procedure Call. The software has been tested on IBM RS/6000 (AIX), IBM PCs running Sun's PC-NFS, NeXT Workstations, and DEC Vaxes (Ultrix). It should support license management for IBM PC (MS-DOS) machines as well as UNIX machines, given a UNIX based file serve. To accomplish these goals, the system was designed as an RPC client server application. In essence, each client that desires to run a licensed application must first "check out" that software from the server. When finished, clients "check in" the application. It is up to the client to follow the procedure. Also, tools are provided for the administrator to perform various management operations.