Get a License#
A license is required to use and run POLARIS. Licenses are managed by the Vehicle and Mobility Systems Department. You can initiate a license request directly using the below buttons.
Use this if you work for a federal or state government agency.
Use this if you work in the private sector.
License Files#
Once the license application is finalized, you will recieve an email from the licensing team with the license file needed to run POLARIS. Typically, we prefer to distribute node-locked licenses, which tie the license to a single machine. These are the simplest licenses for the end user, as the POLARIS executable will simply ask for the location of the license file on the first launch.
However, in situations where this style of license is not sufficient, we can also provide a floating license, which will allow the user to run on multiple machines at the cost of a bit more setup and maintenance. This requires the end-user to setup a local license server to communicate with our own license server, and when POLARIS is run, the executable will checkout a license from your local server, and check the license back in when POLARIS closes. Below are detailed instructions for setting up a license server; if a floating license is requested, you will be sent another copy of these instructions in a folder containing the required files for setup.
Floating License Server Details#
Floating licenses for POLARIS require a license server to be run by the user. When a POLARIS instance on the network is started, it will check for its own individual license file, which will point to your license server and request to check out a license to run. This allows your users to see and control who is running POLARIS.
The recommended way to set up the floating license server is with the lmadmin utility:
Further documentation and more detailed instructions here
There are a few installation options to keep in mind:
Running as an OS service (which requires admin privilege) or manually (this can be changed later).
The installer may want you to choose a configuration path. By default this is in the installation folder, but if you set a different location you will have to specify -configDir whenever you launch lmadmin.
The installer will also want a port to use for the web interface (8090 by default), as well as a Server Port to use. This will default to 0, which means FlexNet will randomly decide between 27000-27009. It’s better to pick a single port and stick to it.
You will also want to download the items in the Dependencies folder of Box, for whichever OS you are running on. AUTONOMI will connect with your license server to check out licenses, while lmutil will be used to setup the server.
After installing, you can start the server manually by calling lmadmin.exe, and you can login to the control panel from a browser at http://<server>:<port_number> (ex. http://localhost:8090). The default username and password are both “admin” but it will ask you to change your password on the first login. Note that while the web interface is the easiest way of managing the server, it can still be done from command line, as detailed in the official documentation.
In order to run the server, you will need to keep three ports open:
One for the web interface, which is 8090 by default and can be changed during installation
The Server Port, which is used to serve licenses to users. This is defaulted to “0” meaning a randomly chosen port between 27000-27009, but it is best to just pick one.
One for your license server to communicate with our license server. This is randomly assigned at startup by default, but can be changed to a fixed address when we set up the vendor daemon. If you want to use a specific port for this, you can give us this information when we generate the server license file.
The last two ports are needed to communicate between client and server, so not only will they need to be open on both machines, they will also need to be authorized in the network level firewalls.
To generate a license file for this server, you will have to send Dynasty the hostid and hostname of the server it will run on. You can use the lmutil.exe utility in the Box folder to find these:
lmutil.exe hostid
lmutil.exe hostid -hostname
The hostname is sometimes finicky, so make sure that it is an actual name and not something like “localhost.localdomain”
After receiving the license file, you can configure the Vendor Daemon. To do this first copy the AUTONOMI.exe file from Box to your lmadmin install directory. Next, open the lmadmin web interface and look for “Vendor Daemon Configuration” under the “Administration” tab. From here you can select the license file you received, and you should be free to start serving licenses!
If you want to specify the port for Vendor Daemon communication, this can be done at the Vendor Daemon Configuration page, after clicking “Administer” on the Vendor you want to change (AUTONOMI).
To let your users check out a license from your server, give them a license file with this format (using the hostname of your server and the Server Port):
SERVER <hostname> 0 <ServerPort>
USE_SERVER
If POLARIS is unable to find this license file, you can set LM_LICENSE_FILE in the environment to the path of the file. Example:
export LM_LICENSE_FILE=/home/user/licenses/polaris.lic