Installing and Configuring Flexlm on Windows

Artwork uses Globetrotter's (Macrovision's) software licensing system called flexlm. Flexlm is used by virtually every EDA company to license products.

Directory naming conflict with daemon name

One of our customers installed flexlm (lmgrd and the artwork.exe daemon) in a directory called:
c:\flexlm\artwork

Upon testing the installation he received an error informing him that the artwork daemon was down or that another instance of artwork was running. The actual problem seemed to be the name of the directory and some locking that the daemon does. Changing the installation directory name to c:\flexlm, or c:\flexlm\artwork_conversion, or any directory path that does not end in artwork fixes the problem.

Older lmtools.exe reports no licenses

One of our customers installed flexlm version 8.1 on his server. When he tested the available licenses with the lmtools utility he found that it reported no licenses available.

Upon further testing and investigation we discovered that he was using an older version of lmtools, 7.0 (or lmutil) which apparently had trouble communicating with lmgrd 8.1 and later. Upon using a current version of lmtools the expected number of licenses were property identified.