Invalid License File due to File Permissions

June 28, 2018

A customer reported an error when trying to start the lmgrd license manager on a Linux server.

[root@lxsrv10 init.d]# /apps/xgdsplot/flexlm/lmgrd -c /apps/flex/artwork.dat

12:35:20 (lmgrd)   Please Note:
12:35:20 (lmgrd)   This log is intended for debug purposes only.
12:35:20 (lmgrd)   In order to capture accurate license
12:35:20 (lmgrd)   Server's System Date and Time: Fri Jun 15 2018 12:35:20 MDT
12:35:20 (lmgrd)   Invalid License File

What Happened

When the user created the license file, artwork.dat, it was created with permission 755. Nothing unusual or irregular about this. However the policy of the lmgrd program is that the license file must have permission 644. So if the file does not have permission 644, lmgrd does issues a chmod command on the file.

In this particular case, lmgrd was being run by a different user than the one who created the license file. Therefore it did not have permission to chmod the license file and the chmod failed. This resulted in the error reported and failure to start up.

Solution

The error was resolved by having the license file's owner manually change the permission of the license file from 755 to 644. In that case, when lmgrd reads the file it does not attempt to change the permission and starts up as expected.