Who is Using my Network Licenses and What I Can do About It

You startup STK, but you soon discover that all the cool add-ons are missing. No Aviator, no Astrogator, no Comm, etc. So you check the STK -> Help -> License Viewer and discover that all your network licenses are in use.

Crap! You have work to do but someone is hogging the licenses. The first thing you want to do is to find out who is using YOUR network licenses. Then take a baseball bat to their computer - or a simple phone call asking the user to shut-down STK may work better (but probably won’t be as fulfilling). You can use the installed LicenseUsage utility or run lmstat from a command line to find the culprit. And if you're lucky, you can determine the user from the login (which is not always the case).

Ahh – so it’s that ‘shepherd’ character – where’s my bat!

If you want to prevent this from happening in the first place, you have two choices: 1) instruct all the STK users how to 'exclude' a license themselves - which is done at start-up (there’s a few methods to accomplish this), or 2) find the network license administrator, who can set-up what known as an 'options' file on the server, which is used to control who can/cannot cheek out specific licenses. This is a simple text file that the administrator maintains and controls.