This article applies to licensing in Visual COBOL R4 and other Micro Focus products which use the latest CES version.

We have introduced a licensing daemon (mfcesd), primarily to support single threaded  applications but with some other benefits, such as cleaning up licenses if  a crash occurs. The product  talks to the daemon and the daemon talks to Safenet. If the daemon is not running you may see an error ‘Cannot communicate with licensing daemon’.

There are two new scripts to start/stop the new daemon startmfcesd.sh and stopmfcesd.sh. If we want to shutdown the licensing completely then we should stop the daemon first then lserv and then vice versa when starting up again.

stopmfcesd.sh

stoplserv.sh

startlserv.sh

startmfcesd.sh

These scripts are in /var/microfocuslicensing/bin and should be run as root.

There is a new utility mfcesdchk which will check if the daemon is running and report the version number.

mfcesdchk

CES daemon running, version 10000.2.00620

If things have gone really bad we can turn on some tracing in the daemon by adding a line to the ces.ini file. The daemon needs restarting to read this file, so it’s probably mainly useful for reproducible problems.

daemontracelevel=7

The daemon will write to a log file /var/microfocuslicensing/logs/mfcesd.log. The log file will cycle after 10Mb to mfcesd.log.

Windows
 
The daemon is installed as a windows service by lmsetup or the product installer. It can be started/stopped via Control Panel/Services - Micro Focus CES daemon.

The tracing is turned on in the same way by editing the ces.ini file and restarting the daemon. The  logfile is written to the same directory as ces.ini depending on the operating system.

Note - on Windows only the Visual COBOL Eclipse and PL/1 products use the daemon. The other Visual COBOL products are expected  to be updated in R5 of the product.