Summary

This article should provide details on why the heartbeat mechanism may not be established if there is a connection to the license server.

Question

When connecting to the Flexnet Publisher license server to gather information through LM_A_VD_FEATURE_INFO it has been observed that the connection closes after 2 hours and null values are returned. It appears that the heartbeat mechanism has not started and the LM_A_TCP_TIMEOUT value has been reached due to inactivity.

Answer

The timeout occurs if no lc_checkout call has occurred against the server. For the heartbeat mechanism to start a call to lc_checkout for a valid license would need to be made. This can be done with the LOCALTEST flag set so that no license is actually checked out but the heartbeat connection is established.

This behavior is seen primarily on Windows, Linux does not seem to require a checkout but this is due to the OS rather than FNP functionality.