Configuring commuter licenses

Commuter licenses allow your end users to check out licenses from the license manager, so that they can use the license when not connected to the network. Commuter licenses are enabled by default. Instructions for actually checking out the commuter license appear in the end user installation instructions.

You can restrict the percentage of licenses that are enabled for commuting on the license manager server. It's a good idea to restrict commuter licenses to prevent all the licenses (tokens) from being used up by commuters. After the specified percentage of licenses have been used by commuters, no more will be available until the commuter licenses expire or are checked back in. You can also configure the maximum duration for which an end user can check out a license. The default maximum duration is 3 days.

Important: If you are using redundant license servers with commuter licenses, only the primary license server allows users to check out and check in commuter licenses. If the primary license server is down, end users will not be able to check out and check in licenses.

To set the percentage of available commuter licenses

  1. Create an LSERVOPTS environment variable on the license manager server. This variable is created during the license manager installation on Windows, so you need to complete this step only for the other operating systems.
  2. Edit the value of the LSERVOPTS environment variable to include -com <percentage>, where <percentage> is a numeric value between 0 and 100 indicating the percentage of licenses that are available for commuting. Specifying 0 disables commuter licenses. This switch is included by default on Windows and is set to 0.
  3. Restart the computer on which the license manager is running.

To set the maximum duration for commuter licenses

The maximum length of time a user can check out a commuter license is specified by the CommuterMaxLife setting in the spssprod.inf file (on Windows) or the commutelicense.ini file (on Mac OS) on the desktop computer. On Windows, this file is located in the product installation directory on the desktop computer. On Mac OS, this file is located in the product installation directory on the desktop computer under Resources/Activation. Open the file and look for CommuterMaxLife. Set the value of this option to the maximum number of days for which an end user can check out a commuter license. This should be a number between 1 and 30. You can also set this value when you push the installation. See the topic Pushing an installation to Windows computers for more information.

Note: This functionality works off the date, not the time. For example, if you set the CommuterMaxLife option to one day, then check a license out at 9 a.m., this license does not get checked back in until midnight on the following day. So although CommuterMaxLife is set to one day, the license is actually held for 39 hours.

To obtain a list of checked out licenses from the command line

You can find out which users have checked out licenses.

  1. Using a command prompt, change to the directory in which the license manager administrator is installed.
  2. Type lsmon <server> (Windows) or ./lsmon <server> (other operating systems), where <server> is the name or IP address of the server on which the license manager is running. You can omit the license server name if you want to view checked out licenses for only the localhost server.

To obtain a list of checked out licenses from the WlmAdmin application

You can also view checked out licenses in the WlmAdmin application:

  1. In the left pane of the WlmAdmin application, click the + sign next to the license manager server.
  2. Click the + sign next to Clients. Clients using the concurrent license are listed. If no clients are listed, no users are using the concurrent license.
  3. Select a particular Client to view whether the client has a checked out license. Review the Detailed Information area in the right pane after selection.