Summary

AMZN_EIP blank on Windows Server 2008

Question

If you have a customer that wants to run their license server on an Amazon EC2 instance. According to the documentation, it should be possible to tie the license to the Elastic IP address. However, they may be unable to get it working, even after taking the following steps:

1. Asked the customer to provide their elastic IP using lmhostid. Customer reported the following:

=====================
C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\lmutil-x64_n6-11.12.1.0v6>lmutil.exe lmhostid -ptype AMZN -eip
lmutil - Copyright (c) 1989-2014 Flexera Software LLC. All Rights Reserved.
The FlexNet host ID of this machine is "AMZN_EIP=54.210.248.132"
=====================

2. They generated a .lic file using this host ID:

=====================
SERVER this_host AMZN_EIP=54.210.248.132
VENDOR demo
FEATURE IDASTAFW demo 6.6 permanent 2
[...]
=====================

3. The user installed the license on the server but was not able to use it. The relevant part of the log:

=====================
16:09:40 (demo) SLOG: Summary LOG statistics is enabled.
16:09:40 (demo) SLOG: FNPLS-INTERNAL-CKPT1
16:09:40 (demo) SLOG: FNPLS-INTERNAL-CKPT2
16:09:40 (demo) Server started on ******** for: IDASTAFW
16:09:40 (demo) IDASTAFM 16:09:40 (demo) Wrong hostid on SERVER line for license file:
16:09:40 (demo) licenses\demo\ida_54.210.248.132_48-B21D-70F4-DD.lic
16:09:40 (demo) SERVER line says AMZN_EIP=54.210.248.132, hostid is AMZN_EIP=
16:09:40 (demo) Invalid hostid on SERVER line
16:09:40 (demo) EXTERNAL FILTERS are OFF
16:09:40 (demo) SLOG: Statistics Log Frequency is 240 minute(s).
16:09:40 (demo) tcp_s is bad!!! Exiting
16:09:40 (demo) EXITING DUE TO SIGNAL 28 Exit reason 5
=====================

One more relevant fragment:

2014-08-12 14:23:22,852 root.LicenseEngine (demo) exited with status 51. (HOSTID does not match the license server environment (virtual|physical))
2014-08-12 14:23:23,868 root.Vendor (demo) stopped.

The non-matching IPv4 is the problem. This error told us the Amazon cloud detection code detected the user wasn't running on Amazon Cloud environment. This could happened when the IPv4 address mapped with the hostname isn't corrected.

Answer

By default, the IPv4 address of the Amazon instance should match with the default private IP address assigned by Amazon (the hostname of the instance usually gives the hint of default private IP).

The problem is specific to Windows 2008 Server trying to use an Amazon EIP. You should be able to disable (clear the checkbox) from the Local Area Connection Properties on the problem system. That will temporarily (until you check the box again to enable) the network interface.

Please note, it doesn't remove the interfaces; its just a temporary disabling them. Once you check the box again, it re-enables the LAN, WAN, and VPN interfaces again. But they'd have to keep this disabled as long as they wanted to use the Amazon EIP address.