Urgent help needed: Licensing snafu following server crash

[Barry Wiseman]

Barry Wiseman wrote:
 > [snip long sorry tale of license management gone south following crash/reboot]

Thanks to Jose, Mark and Brian for offering suggestions, and an entertaining rant on 
the evils of license management, respectively.

For those who may dare the journey to 5.0.15 and beyond, let me report the outcome of 
today's adventure.

I want to thank Ron Kracht for shepherding this issue through channels for me, and 
for racking his brain for every helpful suggestion he could think of.

First he had Lauren provide me a new correct licfp.dat file (no explanation at any 
point of how the "incorrect" file worked for over a month).  This gave more expected 
output from the licinfo utility, which now showed a correct license number and user 
count.  However, dclerk still reported finding a single-user demo license.

In the end, I was working both with Ron and with Ray in tech support.  One or both of 
the following steps (which occurred pretty much concurrently) accomplished the fix:

Ray cobbled up an Even More Correct(TM) license file.  Meanwhile Ron, who had logged 
into the user's server, realized that the licfp.bkp file, which needs to be an 
identical copy of licfp.dat (who knew?), was instead a copy of the former, "bad" file.

At this point, the 5.0.15 dclerk is happily acknowledging the 64-user license once again.

Here is the portion of Ray's writeup which was emailed to me:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Support Incident # 07004406
License error in 5.6 install that has been running for several months

rah 09/18/2007 - MAC address previoulsy used as a check value for Linux (this no 
longer works). After changing the check value to FQDN with value returned by 
hostname, all worked.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At the zenith of my frustration, I had complained to Ron,

	These people have been down a number of hours, for no good reason
	(i.e., license management doesn't add any value to the product!).

Giving the devil his due, here is his response to that thought.  FWIW.

I would take issue with your contention that license management doesn't add any value 
to the product. A minor advantage is that it allows products, feature, and user count 
changes merely by downloading a new license file rather than a new set of programs. 
The major advantages are that it allows us to devote more of our resources to 
improving the product. We now build, maintain, and distribute one set of programs per 
platform rather than the multiple sets we had to previously. We also discovered 
numerous customers who were running illegal copies of filePro installed by 
unscrupulous consultants. Since the customers were not at fault, and in most cases 
had no idea they didn't have valid licensed copies of filePro, we allowed them to 
upgrade as though they had been fully licensed. I remember one case in particular 
where nearly every office in an office complex was running unlicensed copies of 
filePro all installed by the same consultant - who had since disappeared. That 
consultant had purchased one copy of filePro and installed it for all his customers. 
  In the same way that insurance fraud and shoplifting hurt all customers this hurt 
our properly licensed customers.


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  Barry Wiseman                              barry at gensoftdes.com
  Genesis Software Designs, Inc.            Voice: (212) 889-9191
  55 West 45 Street, New York, NY 10036       Fax: (212) 889-1589
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