External Licenses

It is possible (please contact the support team first) for users to install their own software and use their own license servers, e.g. FlexLM. The outbound IP addresses from ZIH systems are:

• NAT via 141.76.3.203 and 141.76.3.204 (for both login and compute nodes)

The IT department of the external institute has to open the firewall for license communications (might be multiple ports) from ZIH systems and enable handing-out license to these IPs and login.

The user has to configure the software to use the correct license server. This can typically be done by environment variable or file.

Attention

If you are using software we have installed, but bring your own license key (e.g. commercial ANSYS), make sure that to substitute the environment variables we are using as default! (To verify this, run printenv|grep licenses and make sure that you dont' see entries refering to our ZIH license server.)

How to adjust the license setting

Most programs, that work with the FlexLM license manager, can be instructed to look for another license server, by overwriting the environment variable "LM_LICENSE_FILE". Do note that not all proprietary software looks for that environment variable.

Changing the license server

marie@compute$ export LM_LICENSE_FILE=12345@example.com

Here "12345" is the port on which the license server is listening, while "example.com" is the network addresss of the license server.

Some licensed software comes with a license file, it can be similarly specified like this:

Changing license

export LM_LICENSE_FILE=<SOME_PATH>

Example:

export LM_LICENSE_FILE=$HOME/mylicense.dat