Updating your License File in FLEXnet (Windows Server Machine)

Download the License File

If the responsibility of the upkeep of your organization's floating licenses falls upon your shoulders, here are the steps that you should take either to successfully update to a new version of Creo or to update your license file when renewal comes around.

First, go to support.ptc.com. Select Manage Licenses from the list of Popular Tasks.

From the License Management portal, type the Host ID of the server machine under Licenses, switch the radio button from "Zip" to "Text", and click "Retrieve".

**If you do not know how to find your Host ID, please see this documentation.

After completing this process, log into the server machine if you haven't done so already. Open whatever email service you use. It needs to be the same email address you used to sign in to support.ptc.com. You should receive an email containing two attachments:

• lm_xxxx.txt
• lm_xxxx_standard.txt

Unless you are using a Pro/ENGINEER version prior to Wildfire 2.0, download the first attachment (lm_xxxx.txt). Save the attachment somewhere you are confident that it won't be accidentally moved or deleted.

**A common practice is to create a "Creo Licenses" folder either on the Desktop, directly on your local disk (the "C:" drive in most cases), or inside the FLEXnet folder structure (typically C:\Program Files\PTC\FLEXnet Admin License Server).

Configuring the License File

There is one more step required to properly configure the new license file. Open the new license file in Notepad along with the old license file currently in use by FLEXnet and place them side-by-side on the screen. Scroll down past the "Summary Table" until you see the following two lines of text:

The first omitted portion of the image above should show the Host ID of the server machine. The second omitted portion should show the same Host ID as well as the port over which the server machine communicates (usually 7788 by default). 

In your old license file the two portions "__HOSTNAME__" and "__PTCD_PATH__" should already be overwritten with the relevant information from your machine. I recommend copying both of these line in their entirety from the old license file and pasting them over the same two line in the new license file.

After properly writing over these two lines in the new license file, it should be fully configured and ready to use in FLEXnet.

Changing the FLEXnet License File

Now that you have your updated license file configured and stored locally on the server machine, it's time to actually change the license file in FLEXnet.

First, open up the FLEXnet Web Interface. To do so, search "flex" in your Windows applications and select FLEXnet Admin Web Interface to open FLEXnet.

Sometimes, this option does not appear in the search. If that happens, there are two other options to open the web interface.

1. From the search, right-click Start FLEXnet Admin Service and select Open file location
2. Click the windows start menu button and scroll through the applications. Expand the "PTC" folder and select FLEXnet Admin Web Interface

**Once you have the FLEXnet web interface open in a browser, you should bookmark the page so that it is easy to open the next time you need it.

When the web interface opens, you will be prompted to sign in. If the web interface happens to open in the "Dashboard", then click to switch to "Administration" in the top-right corner of the window.

**If you have never signed in before, your username will be "admin" and your password will be "admin" by default. As soon as you type in those credentials, you will be prompted to create a new password for future use.

Select the Vendor Daemon Configuration tab from the left-hand side of the window. Click on Administer. This should lead you to the "Vendor Daemon:ptc_d". It is very important that you click Stop before replacing the license file.

After clicking the "Stop" button, you should be kicked back to the previous screen showing the status of the vendor daemon (ptc_d). The Status will say "Shutting Down", but it will not dynamically update to tell you when it has fully shut down. Hit the refresh button and the Status should update to show that the vendor daemon is "Down".

Now click Administer again to swap out the license file. Open a File Explorer window and navigate to wherever you saved your license file earlier. Select the license file, then do a Shift+Right-Click on the file. Following this procedure instead of just a normal right-click, there should be an option to Copy as path.

Now navigate back to the FLEXnet web interface and replace the current path in the "License File or Directory" by pasting the file path that you've just copied.

Now scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save. You should see a notification at the top of the page with the message "Successfully updated the vendor daemon configuration."

**If you receive an error message at this point, there is a good chance that it has to do with the "Vendor Daemon Log". Scroll down to the bottom of the page and look at the "Vendor Daemon Log Location:". Go to that location in a File Explorer window (it typically should be "C:\Program Files\PTC\FLEXnet Admin License Server\logs\ptd_d.log"). Follow the same procedure described above to "Copy as path" and paste it into the "Vendor Daemon Log Location:" box. You will need to take the quotations and the ".txt" off of the end of the file path.

The error may have cleared out any settings that you had previously changed, so be sure to look through anything else that you were intending to change. Once everything looks right, hit save again.

Once everything is updated and saved properly, click the Start button to restart the vendor daemon. Once again, it should kick back out and show a status of "Starting Up". Refresh the page and the status should change to "Up". Now you should be up and running and ready to start using your floating licenses again!

**If the run into any issues along the way, please contact [email protected] for assistance.