Acquiring Satellites..

There probably aren’t many people out there who know what Minitab is to start with. I’m sure there are far less that have ever had to configure a FlexLM License server for it. I ran into some issues setting one up over the past couple days and since I couldn’t find any information to help me out I figure I’ll post the problem and the solution to maybe save someone else a few hours.

The initial problem that usually seen is that the clients cannot connect to the license server and return an error message of -97-121 You’ll also see the following in the minitab.dl file on your license server:

(lmgrd) FLEXnet Licensing (v11.4.0.0 build 31341) /
started on this_host (IBM PC) (3/13/2008)
(lmgrd) License file(s): C:\FlexLM\Minitab\minitab.lic
(lmgrd) Starting vendor daemons ...
(lmgrd) Started minitab (pid 1912)
(minitab) FLEXnet Licensing version v11.4.0.0 build 31341
(minitab) EXITING DUE TO SIGNAL 32
(lmgrd) minitab exited with status 32 /
(Exited because another server was running)
(lmgrd) MULTIPLE "minitab" license server systems running.
(lmgrd) Using Task Manager, stop minitab and run lmreread
(lmgrd)
(lmgrd) This error probably results from:
(lmgrd)   1. Another copy of the license server manager /
<pre><span style="font-size: xx-small;">                                         (lmgrd) is running.
(lmgrd)   2. Another copy of the vendor daemon is running.
(lmgrd)   3. The locking mechanism(s) were removed by an
(lmgrd)        outside program.</span></pre>

Of all the things that can go wrong with FlexLM this has to be one of the trickiest to figure out. After working with Tech support one of the techs brought up that installing to C:\FlexLM\Minitab\ can cause issues due to some legacy code they forgot to remove in the version they were shipping.

So after hours of work trying all sorts of strange FlexLM tricks the solution was to simply rename the folder to anything else besides C:\FlexLM\Minitab\ and use LMTools to update the paths the service is using.