Re: Why Didn't They Ask...
why would you not just license and use flexlm† (lmgrd) rather than reinvent the wheel
Aargh, that brings back memories best forgotten. Clunky old stuff.
Back in the mid-90s I worked for a large HW+SW manufacturer. My group started to get support calls from customers, mostly in the far east, but we had no record of them having bought the software in question. They insisted that they had a legitimate copy. After much investigation we found that the sales guys were giving them the SW licences (just bits of paper with permission to run it) and copies of the media free, to sweeten their hardware deals on which they got commission. Customers thought it was all above board, but our SW group had no record of the "sale", so no revenue nor credit. Senior managers were muttering about closing our "unprofitable" team down due to low sales.
It was decided to add enforced licensing (to protect us from our own sales guys!) and FlexLM was chosen. I got the job of adding it to our products. Testing this meant generating test licences for lab systems, and eventually the licensing centre decided that they trusted me enough just to give me a copy of the tool that would create licences, on the understanding that I wouldn't abuse it (those were the days...). I only had keys for our product, of course.
Fast forward several years, customers who used these on critical systems were increasingly irritated by the licence software which was proving more trouble than it was worth. They had issues with changed hardware (replaced motherboard was a classic) necessitating new keys at short notice, network glitches blocking access to the lmgrd daemon, etc. The sales guys had been educated, managers had realised just how much money we were making with the software, and commission was now also paid on software sales. New versions of the product were released without FlexLM licensing, to a general sigh of relief. The licence centres were closed.
Many years later one large customer with an old system (in an industry that considered 10 years to be a short replacement cycle) had a problem, a replaced system with different ID, failed licence. They couldn't move to the new software version until they'd updated other components and hardware, and that update cycle was scheduled for a year away. Mass panic ensued as the system failed to restart. I got a phone call, did I by any chance know any way to bypass the licence scheme to get them running again?
A rummage in old project subdirectories turned up the lm generation tool which still ran on the current OS version, and I found old emails still had the instructions. A few minutes later a new licence was winging its way to them. I got beers from the field service team.
The motto of this is never throw old software away, you never know when you might need it. I still have it, somewhere, I think...