Transcript Managing software licences     Background Software Licensing LicMon – Licence Monitoring LicMon – Future plans HEPIX 2005 Hege Hansbakk - Managing software licences.

Managing software licences
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Background
Software Licensing
LicMon – Licence Monitoring
LicMon – Future plans
HEPIX 2005
Hege Hansbakk - Managing software licences
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Background
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CERN IT-DES supports and distributes
more than 100 software packages
Most packages are commercial
Commercial software requires licences
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Hege Hansbakk - Managing software licences
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Software Licensing
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A software licence deals with issues of
copyright law and product liability law
Two general licensing schemes:
open source or closed source
Closed source restrict the user's actions,
and require that the user 'signs-up to'
the licence
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Hege Hansbakk - Managing software licences
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Software Licensing
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Several closed source licensing schemes
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Single user
Node locked
Network/Floating
Site wide
Home use
A licence usually comes as a text file
HEPIX 2005
Hege Hansbakk - Managing software licences
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Software Licensing Tasks
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Purchase
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Installation
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Challenge: How many do we need?
Challenge: On which server does a specific
licence run?
Availability
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Challenge: Assure accessibility
HEPIX 2005
Hege Hansbakk - Managing software licences
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Software Licensing Tasks
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Renewal
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Retirement
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Challenge: How do you remember all the different
expiration dates?
Challenge: How can we be sure a licence is
unused?
Keep track of supported products
Inform users about updates and problems
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Hege Hansbakk - Managing software licences
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Licence Management Systems
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Provide licences to end users
Monitor the usage of the licences
Challenge: Many different systems
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Macrovision FlexLM, IBM LUM, Wolfram
MathLM, Microsoft SMS, Sassafras K2
Challenge: No common interface
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Hege Hansbakk - Managing software licences
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LicMon – Licence Monitoring
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Infrastructure to deal with the challenges of
software licensing
Developed at CERN by IT-DES
Open Source Licence
Consists of four parts
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Licence Servers
Log Parser
Product Database
Web Interface
HEPIX 2005
Hege Hansbakk - Managing software licences
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LicMon Infrastructure
Log parser
Clients
Licence Servers
Web
Interface
Product
Database
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Hege Hansbakk - Managing software licences
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LicMon – Licence Servers
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Availability of Service very important
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We have redundant servers
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Service must be up at all times
Licence manager daemons as well
2*3 Solaris
3+1+1+1 Windows
Not all licence managers allow fallback setup
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Monitor servers and daemons and start/stop
daemons
If vendor is not flexible enough: no fallback
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Hege Hansbakk - Managing software licences
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LicMon – Log Parser/Product DB
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Read log files of different licence managers
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Extract needed information and store in DB
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Each with own format…
~ 1k lines of Perl, C or shell script per parser
Which product, feature, version
Used by whom, when, from which host
Provides unified interface
Long term storage in DB
Easy access
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Hege Hansbakk - Managing software licences
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LicMon – Web Interface
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LicMon – Web Interface
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LicMon – Statistics
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Do we have enough/too many licences?
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Maximum number of concurrent users
Number of denials
For the different operating systems
For the different versions of the product
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Hege Hansbakk - Managing software licences
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LicMon – Statistics
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Lists of users
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Current users
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Recent users
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Ask user X to free a licence for Y
Warn them about imminent changes
Inform about planned changes, downtimes
With email address
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Hege Hansbakk - Managing software licences
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LicMon – Statistics
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Hege Hansbakk - Managing software licences
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LicMon – Statistics
Version 6.4 of TotalView not used anymore, consider retirement
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LicMon – If things go wrong
Problems in fetching a log file
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Problems in parsing a log file
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LicMon Summary
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Provides us with a common interface
Helps us to:
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Estimate the correct number of licences to buy
Keep track of our products and licences
Inform the users of updates and problems
Find users that are blocking a licence
Know when to retire a product
Warn the product maintainers when a licence is
about to expire
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Hege Hansbakk - Managing software licences
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LicMon – Future plans
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Working on new version to make it more
efficient, object oriented and configurable.
3 access levels; public, maintainers, admin.
Add monitoring of MAC products with the
help of Sassafras KeyServer.
Possibility to compare usage of different
versions of a product.
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Hege Hansbakk - Managing software licences
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LicMon – Future plans
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Integrate the product database with the
product support web pages of the group.
Warnings when usage approaches limits for
all products.
Timetable of when licences needs to be
renewed.
Add more reporting options, f.ex which
products were used/not used for a given
period.
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