rpi-dotcio / phpLicenseWatcher

License

This program is licensed under the terms of GNU Public License. You can read it at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html#SEC1 or you can find a file LICENSE in this directory with a plain text copy of it.

What this program does

• Shows the health of a license server or a group of them
• Check which licenses are being used and who is currently using them
• Get a listing of licenses, their expiration days and number of days to expiration
• E-mail alert of licenses that will expire within certain time period ie. within next 10 days.
• Monitors server utilization
• Provides usage charts

Warning

There is no warranty on this package. We wrote this system to help keep tabs on our FlexLM servers. We are not FlexLM developers and base this system on using the publicly available commands such as lmstat, lmdiag. This may not work for you. No specific platform is targeted, but development and testing is primarily done with Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS.

Please do not run phplicensewatcher on a publicly available Internet server because it has not been audited to make sure it is secure. It likely isn't. You have been warned.

Limitations

Currently FlexLM and MathLM (Mathematica) servers are supported but in the future a wider array of license servers may be supported.

Requirements

• 64-bit PHP enabled web server
• MySQL (MariaDB is not officially targeted, but has received community support)
• FlexLM lmutil binary for the OS you are running the web server on.

Install process

1. Retrieve required packages for your OS/distribution:

   • Apache2
   • PHP 7.3 or higher
   • MySQL-server, MySQL-client, PHP MySQL Extension
   • You need the Linux Standard Base (LSB) to run Linux-precompiled FlexLM binaries.

   For example, using Ubuntu 20.04:

   sudo apt install apache2 php mysql-server mysql-client php-mysql lsb
   

2. Clone repository locally using git

   git clone https://github.com/rpi-dotcio/phpLicenseWatcher.git /var/www/html/
   

3. Create the database

   mysqladmin create licenses
   mysql -f licenses < phplicensewatcher.sql
   

4. Copy "config/sample-config.php" to "./config.php" and edit it for the proper values for your setup. Brief instructions are provided within the file as code comments.

5. Setup cron to run scheduled tasks

   0 6 * * 1 php /var/www/html/license_alert.php >> /dev/null
   0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * php /var/www/html/license_util.php >> /dev/null
   15 0 * * 1  php /var/www/html/license_cache.php >> /dev/null
   

6. You should use your web server's built in capabilities to password protect your site.

7. Navigate to page check_installation.php to check for possible installation issues.

What is "LM Default Usage Reporting"?

FlexLM documentation states that FlexLM should report license usage based on licenses checked out by users, only. However, our internal FlexLM systems were also including reserved (but not in use) licenses in that count.

• When set true, PHP License Watcher will accept FlexLM's usage report as is. This is the original behavior for PHP License Watcher (up to build 220503).
• When set false, PHP License Watcher will do its own count of licenses in use, based on identified users of the license, and record/report that value.
• This value is set on a per server basis. It is found through server administration.
• For Mathematica, this value is set true and should not be changed.

Crontab details

There are CLI scripts that need to be executed ie. license_util.php and license_cache.php.

• License_util.php is used to get current license usage. It should be run periodically throughout the day ie. every 10 minutes.
• License_cache.php stores the total number of available licenses on particular day. This script is necessary because you may have temporary keys that may expire on a particular day and you want to capture that. It should be run once a day preferably soon after the midnight after which license server should invalidate all the expired keys.
• license_alert.php checks for expiring licenses and emails admins. We run once a week.

Example Screenshots