Reinstalling Micro Focus Server Express/OCDS License

Reinstalling Micro Focus Server Express/OCDS License Management
Facility
Micro Focus Server Express and Object COBOL Developer Suite products are license protected by
the License Management Facility (LMF). From time to time, the need to reinstall the license
database arises. This article discusses some of the reasons why you would need to reinstall the
license database and how to accomplish the reinstallation.
The license information is held in a license database. Any licensing software is going to have various
traps to prevent the license database being improperly modified or copied. Unfortunately, this
means that sometimes legitimate activities (eg. recovery from backup) can be misconstrued by LMF
as illegal tampering, and LMF will flag the database as corrupt. Removing the corrupt database,
installing a fresh empty database, and adding your current licenses back into this new database are
necessary to recover from this. There are several ways of accomplishing this. Reinstalling the entire
LMF system is one method that works reliably without too much effort.
There are other reasons why you may want to reinstall the LMF, or SupportLine may advise you to
reinstall. A number of these reasons are related to having more than one product version on your
Unix machine. You should have only one license database on your system, holding licenses for all
your development products. Although you can mix licenses for different products within the
database, for LMF to work correctly the LMF software has to be the later or latest version. The
product install scripts should help you achieve this, but some users prefer to upgrade the LMF
software after, rather than during, the installation of a new product.
Often users install more than one database in different locations. This can lead to bizarre behaviour
- an error message of 'unable to contact license manager' when the license manager appears to be
running, or 'you are not licensed to use this product' when you can see valid licenses in the
database can be a clue to the presence of more than one database. A variation on this is users who
have inadvertently installed the LMF facility in the release directory $COBDIR/lmf - more about this
later.
There is one special case - If you are a Solaris user with both Server Express 1.1 and Server
Express 2.0.x licenses for the same machine then please contact SupportLine before embarking on
the following.
Prerequisites to reinstallation
You must have the following available:
• Root permission
• All your current licenses - Each license consists of a Serial Number and a License Number.
It is not sufficient to have the license numbers shown when you browse your license
database, as these are incomplete. The full license numbers will have been shipped to you
in hard copy, normally in a License Key Folder. If you have mislaid your License Key Folder,
contact your account manager to purchase replacement licenses.
• Your copy of the License Management Facility Administrator's Guide (either hard copy or on
your documentation CD)
Stage 1 - Shutting down existing processes
After suitable warnings to users, etc, log in as root and change directory to the directory where your
LMF system is installed. This will probably be /usr/lib/mflmf or /opt/lib/mflmf. If you have more
than one copy of LMF installed, change directory to any one of them. Run './lmfgetpv' ( all these
commands are documented in your Administrators Guide). This will tell you whether your License
Manager is running, and if it is the directory it was started from. If this directory is different from
your current directory, then change your directory to the listed directory.
If the License Manager is running, run './lmfgetpv k' and this should close it down. It's worth
checking that it has closed down cleanly. In simplistic terms, the License Manager consists of two
parts, a process called mflm_manager, and a pipe file called LMF_common. Each time you start up a
licensed process (cob, anim, tbox, DS), the process uses the pipe to communicate with
mflm_manager, which then issues or denies a license
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Reinstalling Micro Focus Server Express/OCDS License Management
Facility
Checks should be made to ensure that both process and pipe have disappeared. To check the
process, use something like 'ps -ef|grep mflm'. If all other methods fail you may have to kill this
process. To check the pipe file, just look for its existence. If it exists it will always be in /tmp, or the
location defined by $TMPDIR if you use this environment variable. If it is still present then 'rm' it.
(Incidentally, if you experience random unexplained failures of LMF, it's worth checking there is no
housekeeping routine which regularly deletes the files in /tmp - it's not uncommon - and removing
the pipe file while LMF is running is a sure way to confusion).
Stage 2 - checking for license databases
The license database is an indexed file pair called mflmfdb and mflmfdb.idx. There are backups of
these, for our use, called mflmfdbX and mflmfdbX.idx. See how many you can discover with a find -
something like 'find / -name mflmfdb* -print' should do. In the ideal world there should be one set
of the four files and they should be in your current directory, which should be ./mflmf. If this is not
the case, make a note of the locations of the files.
Stage 3 - removing software and databases
All the databases you have found need to be removed and replaced with one new empty database.
Although it seems a bit extreme, the best way to do this is to remove all the directories you have
found and reinstall a new mflmf directory. As stated before, the mflmf directory contains both the
License Management software and the license database. By removing the entire directory, you can
make sure that you reinstall the software with the latest version. If removing the directory gives
you any qualms, then rename and delete them later.
There is one exception to. To explain this, you need to understand the difference between lmf
directories and mflmf directories. LMF directories reside under your COBOL product(s), i.e., under
$COBDIR, and are the install directories. They contain the LMF software release, an install script,
and a .gnt that the install script uses to create an empty database. The mflmf directory contains the
installed software and the live license database. It used to be possible, when you were installing
LMF, to install it over itself, by selecting $COBDIR/lmf as the location for the installed software and
database. If you find a database in an lmf directory, remove the database files but not the
directory.
Note: Installing from an lmf directory that contains a database will give you a previously
undocumented error message "database failure".
Stage 4 - reinstall software and empty database
Next, locate the most current version of License Management software on your machine. If you only
have one OCDS or Server Express product then that's easy - it will be in $COBDIR/lmf. If you have
more than one product, it will be the lmf directory in the latest product. In this respect, Server
Express is regarded as later than OCDS, even if the release date is earlier.
Change directory to the relevant lmf directory. Check once again that you don't have any database
files in it. Then run the script 'sh mflmfinstall'. This will copy the License Management software to a
new mflmf directory, and create an empty database. You will need to tell the script the location of
your new mflmf (use the default unless you have a good reason not to). Answer 'N' to the question
about starting LMF at boot time. This install script runs a .gnt to create an empty database; this
runs silently, so keep an eye open for the message 'empty database created'.
Stage 5 - add license keys and restart License Manager
Change directory to your newly acquired mflmf directory. You can use 'sh mflmadm' to install your
licenses, but you may find it easier to use the command line version 'sh mflmcmd'. After adding all
your licenses (in any order), start the license manager with 'sh mflmman', and then go into the
License Administration Services with 'sh mflmadm' . Just check that you can see all your licenses,
and hit F7 (refresh) - you shouldn't need to do this, but it will do no harm. Note that the screen
prompts are correct but earlier versions of the documentation have a misprint and refer to F3 for
refresh.
Stage 6 - tidy up
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Reinstalling Micro Focus Server Express/OCDS License Management
Facility
Check that developers can access the product without license problems. Check that your current
location of mflmf matches the path in any relevant inittab entries. Remove the renamed old mflmf
directories when you feel confident.
And finally -
If in any doubt, or things don't go as planned, contact SupportLine - we are here to help!
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