Summary

With clients where the default location is not writable (large server farm), in order to deploy the application the default location for the license manager needs to be changed.

Question

With clients where the default location is not writable (large server farm), in order to deploy the application the default location for the license manager needs to be changed. This is to implement secure data types.

Does prepping for secure data type only avoid the trusted storage anchor requirement? If not, how would this be accomplished?

Answer

Please note that SDTs have no effect on, or relationship with, trusted storage (TS) anchors. SDTs prevent (some) binary tampering, whereas anchors prevent TS-restore exploits.

This concerns not being to write to /usr/local/share, which is where we put TS, file anchors, and the licensing service.

A workaround is to create a symbolic link on a remote server to a local volume location present on all client machines upon which they wish to run FlexNet Publisher applications. A typical location might be under /var.

So using /var as an example, the steps would be, prior to installing FlexNet Publisher:

1. On the remote server, with root privilege:
   ln -s /var/local/share/macrovision /usr/local/share/macrovision
ln -s /var/local/share/FNP /usr/local/share/FNP
2. On every client machine using FlexNet Publisher, with root privilege:
   mkdir -p /var/local/share/macrovision
chmod 755 /var/local/share/macrovision
mkdir -p /var/local/share/FNP
chmod 755 /var/local/share/FNP

FlexNet Publisher installation can now take place on each desired client and will result in Trusted Storage, anchors & the licensing service (installed in /usr/local/share/FNP) all being correctly localized.