Stealing Creo licences...

[nhanratty]

All

We have a triad licence server providing licences to users at three sites. Each leg of the triad is located at one of the sites.

Our users regularly 'lose' their Creo licences, i.e. they get the licence error message 'Save, Exit or Retry' and normally the Retry option does not work.

I am aware of the ptcflush command and use it often to release licences that are 'stuck' to a users PC even though Creo is no longer running on the PC. Some of my users are familiar with this command also and what I find quite often is that when a user loses their licence they are immediately unable to get it back because there are none available - almost as if another user has 'stole' the licence.

So my question is can a user 'steal' a Creo licence from another user by using the ptcflush command if there are no free licences available?

PTC have told me this is not possible but I have been told otherwise by some members of the exploder. Just wondering if anybody can definitively say that yes they can or no they can't. I have tried it myself but it did not prevent the user from using Creo so I'm a little confused as to what ptcflush will actually do.

Thanks for any advice.

Regards,

Neal

[StephenW]

At the risk of incriminating myself, I have done this. There are a few specific things that make it work or not work.

If you flush someone's license and they are actively working, it won't work, the license simply is re-taken by the active user. But if the user has been inactive for a while, I have found you can flush that license and take it. The next time the inactive user gets back to working, he will not have a license.

Way back when we used to scrape by on a few too many licenses, I would look for users who had more than one license (multiple sessions running at the same time). It was likely that they would not be active on both sessions.

I won't admit to any other nefarious actions, although I will say I have probably done a couple.

I may be wrong about all this but it sure seemed to work at the time. I usually copied the ptcstatus output so if it didn't work the first time, I could try again pretty quick and also to see the results, who won and who lost.

[msteffke]

It has always been my experience that the PTCFlush command will not flush a license that is being used.

Mark Steffke
Engineering Services and Design Standards
Manitowoc Foodservice
T 989.775.9215 or 989.773.7981, ext 12484
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[BrianMartin]

Absolutely not true unless something has changed in the lady few years. It has always been possible to kick someone else of their license and steal it from them. If you boot them from the license, you can pick it up as long as you hurry up and launch a new session before they try to regain their list license.

Remove the ptcflush command from your users' bin directory to prevent them from misusing it this way.

Thanks,
Brian



Sent from my T-Mobile 4G LTE Device

[msteffke]

I checked it, You are indeed correct. They usually pull the license back so fast I did not notice. So , I recall my statement! 🙂

[davehaigh]

Since I'm giving a talk on this in June let me shed a little light on what's going on. This is coming right out of what I'm going to say in June.


How licensing works:

[nhanratty]

Thanks to all for your responses...simple answer seems to be that yes you can 'steal' a users' cfreo licence with the help of ptcflush if they have been inactive for a short period of time.

One further question I have...is it possible to find out who may have used the ptcflush command in the first place? i.e. is it possible to identify the 'thief'?

[LawrenceS]

Thanks for the valuable tip David! Hope we can implement this soon and free up more licences.