Bring your own license

If you can install and run your software with your private license key on our systems you are just fine.
However, if you want to access a remote license server providing a cluster license (e.g. operated by your IT department) take the following steps:

1. Determine if you need to access your license server from our compute nodes, our login nodes, or both. Typically, production runs are executed only on compute nodes.
2. Check, that the relevant license server ports are accessible from 130.73.234.140 (public IP of all our compute nodes behind NAT) and/or 130.73.234.[1-20] (our login nodes), respectively.
   If not, you need to ask your local IT to open your license server to external access from these IPs and ports (without VPN†).
   Please configure the ports of your license server statically (see remark *).
3. Send a mail to support@nhr.zib.de including the name (FQDN) or IP and port numbers of your license server.
   If your license server is inside a subnet (using NAT), we need the name or IP and port of its access point.
4. Please wait for our reply, that the corresponding IP forwarding rules are activated in our firewall/gateway.
5. Test it (from our compute/login nodes):
   telnet your-license-server-ip port-nr
   This test ("Trying..") is positive if the server answers:
   Escape character is '^]'.


†) Access to VPN networks is not possible. Unfortunately, there is no general VPN solution that we can install globally. VPN protocols are vendor-specific (e.g., Cisco AnyConnect) and not universal.
*) FLEXlm license servers usually use two TCP ports ("SERVER" and "VENDOR"), and both of them need to be configured in the firewall/gateway. By default, the VENDOR port is dynamic (i.e. chosen randomly) and may change on restart of the license server. To remain accessible from our system, both SERVER and VENDOR ports need to be statically configured in the license server (VENDOR xyz port=1234). See also http://www.hlynes.com/2010/01/21/flexlm-license-servers-and-firewalls