Hi,

We, in our office use a remote Matlab License server running FlexLM license manager. Since we have very few floating licenses we end up asking to release the license from the fellow engineers many times a day.This creates confusion as we are not knowing who is actually using the license.
To automate this I plan to make a simple application wherein I'll monitor the connection to that particular matlab server and see which user has actually hooked up a license if a socket to that server:port becomes alive. Then I would start broadcasting to the rest of the users that this user is using the License.
This can be achieved my making a service that would feed a frontend application with the broadcast details which would let people actually know who is using the license. It is a simple License viewer.
Since I don't have administrative access to the license server (it is organization wide server) so I just can monitor connections from my system or from a group of users who actually install the service I am planning to make.

My only concern now is since I am to use broadcast mode for letting others know I have hooked up a license I would be in trouble with network bandwidth.

Does anybody have a better architecture to prevent the broadcast and use some other tricky method.

Maybe you can use a ready made solution from openlm

It is able to monitor user activity and release the license back to the pool when licenses are needed by other user. It also supply end user tool to query the availbility of licenses.

Network load is very low and the software is relaible and working in many sites.

I definitely could use the solution from openlm had been having the administrative access of the License Server. I am just a user of the license server and in no way can have any installation done as it is an Organization Wide server.

No need to install openlm on the license server, you can just install on any other server or on your PC. It will query the license server remotely.

I am always getting this error

Error getting status: Invalid returned data from license server system. (-12,16)

Also what is looks to me like is that only if FlexLM is already installed I would be able to use this as an Optimizer

OpenLM server is the part that monitors the FLEXlm server and collect the information about licenses availability. It can work with multiple FLEXlm servers that do not have to run on the same server that OpenLM is running on.

There is no need for FLEXlm installation on the computer that runs OpenLM server.

Where do you get this error?

As a quickfix solution OpenLM has immensely helped me.It is a great License Manager with an additional feather on its cap being under GNU GPL.It has provided great details for each user who hooks up to the license server even with report creation and usage metrics.

But I would still like to get inputs for the question that had initiated this thread. Please let me know some architecture or design that can help me achieve the solution I proposed earlier.