FS Auth - Check for presence of Sentinel servers on your network

FS Auth - Check for presence of Sentinel servers on your network

Problem

  1. You may be encountering one of the scenarios shown below activating a Freedom Scientific software product. 
    You need to check that a Sentinel Server can be accessed from a workstation so it can access the network license. 
  2. You have a single user license and getting an error such as "Error validating license code".  

Resolution

Below are steps to check whether a Sentinel Server exists and can be seen by a client installation for a network license.  

  1. Open Start menu and type to search Command Prompt.
  2. Right click the result and choose Run As Administrator.
  3. Then at the command prompt type or copy/paste the following command and press ENTER to navigate to that folder:

    cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\Freedom Scientific\Authorization\Tools"

  4. Then enter this command and press ENTER:

    lswhere.exe

    This will conduct a search of the network to see if there are any Sentinel servers on the network.
Based on the information obtained you can then take appropriate action to resolve the issue being experienced.

Error 17: No servers on this subnet

If the above message is displayed it means that no Sentinel Server has been discovered on the network.  If you have a network license this probably means that the Sentinel server is not properly set up or is being blocked by a firewall.




If the Sentinel server is not detected as in the above screenshot please consider these possible areas to address:

  1. LSFORCEHOST is not set correctly on the client machine, if you used computer name I would try using IP address to see if that works.  Send a screenshot of the changes if still a problem.
  2. There is incoming firewalling on server preventing contact see firewall ports.
  3. There is local firewalling on the client blocking incoming/outgoing connections to Sentinel server, see firewall ports.
  4. The server is on a separate VLAN, if this is the case LSFORCEHOST will not work.  

Sentinel server details displayed


  • If a client installation does not find the Sentinel Network license you may need to set an LSFORCEHOST on the client to make sure they find the installed license server using IP address or computer name as the value.
  • If activating a single user license one may also wish to use LSFORCEHOST but use the IP address or computer name of the client PC to prevent the single user license being applied elsewhere generating a false error "validating license code".  LSFORCEHOST when set will allow the license to be sent to the client PC installation.