Up and Ready

Licensing: How can I control license usage with options file and Active Directory integration?

Currently, there are 3rd party tools available for integrating the Autodesk licensing options file (adskflex.opt) or other flexlm basesd software licenses with Active Directory.

If you need to control the license usage using adskflex.opt file integrated with Active Directory Users and Computers, you could use the following Group Policy settings.

This is only tested in the lab, so if you come across any issues, please share your experience with the community. This is not an officially supported or tested work flow.

Basic strategy to achieve this integration is using Group Policy Objects in the Active Directory and "LM_PROJECT" System variable as documented here

Example work flow would be as follows.

1. Create a New Group in Active Directory and add users and computers who can use the specific Autodesk Product i.e.  AutoCAD Users

   

    

2. Create Group Policy object to create System Environment variable as documented here (i.e. Variable Name: "LM_PROJECT", Value:"ACADUSERS")

   

3. Target the Variable only to the Certain Security group in Active Directory

   

   

4. Create adskflex.opt file on the license server with the following line:

   INCLUDE 85871ACD_2013_0F PROJECT ACADUSERS

   The above line forces the Users/Computer within Active Directory group "AutoCAD Users" to use AutoCAD 2013 license, all the others would be denied AutoCAD Licenses.

5. Stop and Start the license service.
6. Login to the domain from the AutoCAD client machine, (or refresh the group policy )
7. Whenever you want give a new user access to AutoCAD 2013, It is as simple as adding the user/Computer to the "AutoCAD Users" group in the Active Directory.

Note:  If you wish control the usage per user within the same computer, you could use the GPO Delegation (Permissions) tweak to deny the users/group access to the particular GPO as documented here

AutoCAD LT Alert: The directory may be locked by another process or have been set to Read Only

Here is an interesting error message when launching AutoCAD LT 2013 for Mac:

AutoCAD LT Alert The directory may be locked by another process or have been set to Read Only

In this case, we tried to fix permissions of Mac OS X on the computer by using Disk Utility but that didn't work.

To solve the problem, we needed to add Read & Write permissions to the /Users/users folder to get AutoCAD LT to work.

1. Highlight the /Users/user folder (or name of the user account that is having the problem).  In this case, the user account was called: user.

2. Right Mouse click on the folder and select > Get Info.

3. Change the permissions to Read & Write for all user types.

Thanks to Stephanie E for confirming that this solution worked.

Revit LT released...

Please check out the details in the Revit Clinic:

http://revitclinic.typepad.com/my_weblog/2012/09/revit-lt.html

PDSS Licensing: Autodesk Product Design suite Standard License and using Previous Versions of Inventor

We have added Inventor in Product Design Suite Standard 2013 [PDSS].   Due to this addition there has been some confusion around the previous versions of Inventor allowed to run with the new PDSS subscription (Package) license. Final change to the license has been done on 31 July 2012.

If you are on subscription and you have been issued a PDSS licenses prior to 1^st August 2012, please re-issue the licenses to use previous versions of Inventor as documented here.

Licenses be obtained online at https://registeronce.autodesk.com

Reference:

http://upandready.typepad.com/up_and_ready/2011/07/general-licensing-requesting-a-network-license-online.html