NX For Mac Licensing Problem

For the past two weeks I have been trying to get NX 7.5 licensed on my MacBook. I filed an incident report with Siemens PLM on 17th December. That resulted in an email thread that became a mile long with attachments of screen shots and log files. Today, 31st December, I finally got it to work.

After I installed NX on my MacBook and fired it up it I got this error message:

“The proper license does not exist. The UGS_LICENSE_BUNDLE environment variable is either not set or set incorrectly.”

The log file had something like this:

“Deelip-Menezess-MacBook.local”: Not a valid server hostname, exiting.
Valid license server system hosts are: “Deelip-Menezess-MacBook”

I will not bore you with things I tried that did not work. Long story short, I uninstalled NX, changed the server name in the license file to 127.0.0.1 and reinstalled. When asked for the server name during installation I specified 127.0.0.1. That did it.

Here is something that Siemens PLM support wrote to me after two weeks of messing around with the Flexnet licensing system which finally led me to the solution.

Mac OS X is different than many other operating systems due the fact that when the networking conditions change the hostname of a Mac workstation will change. While on the network (e.g.apple.com), the hostname is mac1.apple.com. While disconnected from all networks the hostname changes to mac1.local. FLEXnet relies on the use of the hostname to locate the server so this hostname change causes the license server daemons to loose communication and prevents the client application from connecting to the license server. The result is an NX startup error caused by the inability to get a license. This condition usually occurs when a single user on a laptop installs the license server and NX on the same laptop. Use one of the following recommendations to help prevent or resolve this situation.

1. Install a license server on a workstation or system that has a stable domain. It is recommended that a central license server be used for all client applications.

2. Use the local IP address (127.0.0.1) for the hostname.

I chose option 2 and it worked. Hope this helps if you are facing this problem and have ended up here while searching for a solution. Cheers!