Licensing Win10 laptop - Reg settings not working

[davehaigh]

In Windows 7 setting up flexnet licensing on a laptop required the following registry settings to turn off media sensing in order to make the NIC card always available regardless if it cable was plugged into a network or not.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\

   Name: DisableDHCPMediaSense

   Data type: REG_DWORD (Boolean)

   Value: 1

Typically you also had to set the NIC sort order by renumbering the folders in this section of the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\NetworkCards

• This key will contain numbered folders corresponding to all of the network cards installed on the machine
• Locate the desired folder by matching the "Description" field in the Registry Editor to the "Description" line from the ipconfig /all output for the desired network card
• Rename this folder to number 1
• Close the registry editor
• Restart the machine

These settings are not working to disable media sense in Windows 10. When the network cable is plugged in, ptchostid.bat reports built-in nic’s mac address, when not plugged in it reports the wireless mac address.

Obviously the license fails when no network cable is plugged in.

How do you ensure that the NIC is always enabled in Windows 10 regardless of its connection status?

[MartinHanak]

Hi,

in Windows 7 I use netsh commands mentioned on http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-desktop/how-to-disable-media-sense-in-windows-7/18277955-3f2c-4328-bd87-d3567579b645?auth=1 page.

Recently I used these commands in Windows 10, too ... and it seems to me that they work well.

MH

[davehaigh]

Martin,

Thanks for the link. I didn't know of this other method. Much cleaner than editing the registry.

I did:

netsh interface ipv4 show global
netsh interface ipv6 show global

to show the current state. And even though I have the reg entry it showed enabled.

then I did:

netsh interface ipv4 set global dhcpmediasense=disabled
netsh interface ipv6 set global dhcpmediasense=disabled

and ran the commands to show the state again, which now showed it disabled.

My other issue was I had the license assigned to the WIFI card not the wired NIC. I reconfigured the license and installed it again.

License now worked connected or not connected. Great. Rebooted several times checking connected vs not connected and it continued to work.

Next day while connected I fired up Creo and was working for a few minutes when the license said it couldn't connect to the server and dumped me out of Creo.

GRRRRRRR!

I checked the mac address using ptchostid, and ipconfig /all both were showing the mac address listed in the license.dat file. The log file said there was a mismatch between the mac address on the machine and the license.dat file. Yet all my checking showed them to be the same.

I finally rebooted the machine and tried again. This time everything worked as expected.

I still don't know what's going on with Windows 10. But it seems if I reboot it fixes the issue.

[MartinHanak]

David,

just FYI ... recently I "wrestled" with lmadmin_ptc under Windows 10. It was the case "yesterday it worked, today it cannot start". After half hour I decided to disable lmadmin version of FLEXnet 11.13 and enabled lmgrd.exe version of FLEXnet 11.13.  lmgrd.exe+ptc_d.exe started successfuly and runs without problems.

MH

[davehaigh]

I think I need to open a case with PTC.

It may be ok for my laptop to use the old version of the license server, but I don't want to do that on our central license server.

I use the web tools, and like the ability to modify the ptc.opt file and re-read it without shutting down the license server.

Also it gives you the ability to return borrowed licenses early.