One situation we hear about on a regular (but infrequent) basis is similar to the following:

“My license server reports multiple licenses checked out from the same person, yet I know that this person is only using one license.  Why is this?”

As a general rule, this results from users removing laptops from the corporate network, then re-attaching later.  But it could occur any time a machine is either removed from the network, or shut down improperly.

The reason this happens is that the license server machine does not detect that the client side of the connection has been terminated.  This is an unfortunate aspect of TCP/IP, and it will vary on different platforms.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution to this problem – the TIMEOUT option in the ISV options file.

If this happens only on a single product, you can add a line similar to the following:

TIMEOUT 3600 the-one-product-with-the-problem

This would cause licenses for “the-one-product-with-the-problem” to be timed out after 1 hour of inactivity.

Alternately, if this happens to many products, you could add the line:

TIMEOUTALL 3600

This line would cause all products from this ISV to time out after one hour of inactivity.

Either of these lines would be added to your ISV options file – by default “isvname.opt” (where “isvname” is the ISV server name), contained in the directory with the license server binaries.  Alternately, you can specify any option filename you like on the ISV line in the license file.   Don’t forget to do a reread on the license server after you edit the options file.

One last thing – your ISV can control the minimum timeout time for any individual product.  By default, this is 1 hour in RLM (3600 seconds).  However, if the ISV specifies:

min_timeout=xxx

in an individual license, then that minimum time would apply even if you attempt to set a shorter timeout time.