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Tech Tip: Kusari Licence Management System

Some of our users may have noticed that we are gradually moving to a new licence management system, called Kusari.

Eventually all our products will use Kusari and licence key installation will become uniform once more. We are, in addition, developing an interface to make the installation of a licence key much simpler.

Because many of our users are single-user, PC-Windows based, this note gives an overview of the steps required to obtain and install a Kusari licence key on this system. Other machine ranges will follow the same general procedures, but will differ in detail. The more detailed information is, in all cases, found under the license subdirectory or from http://nag.co.uk/Kusari/download.asp or in the Installer's Note for the appropriate implementation. These are provided with the product but are also available on the web (see http://www.nag.co.uk/doc/inun.asp.

If you completed the ‘trial request form’ on the NAG download page then you should have received a trial key. If so you may jump straight to stage d); otherwise begin at a)

a) Obtain a machine identification string using the khostid program provided. A good technical tip here is to save the output from this program to a file. (On a PC this means opening a Command Prompt, changing to the .\license\bin\w32 subdirectory and typing khostid>nag.txt at the command prompt.)

b) Edit the file nag.txt, perhaps using Notepad or otherwise your favourite plain text editor, to include the product code of the product you are installing, for example FLDLL214Z if you are installing the Mark 21 Fortran DLLs. Also include your name, the company name and address and the NAG site reference, if known.

c) Send the file by email to your local NAG office. This will be one of support@nag.co.uk, support@nag.com or help@nag-j.co.jp

d) You will receive a licence key back from your local office. Place this in a file, or append it to an existing Kusari licence file (but not a FLEXlm licence file), making sure that there is a blank line at the end of the file. As with b), if you are editing an existing file, or creating a new file, then a plain text editor, such as Notepad, must be used. Products such as Word, which are not plain text editors, are NOT suitable for this purpose.

e) The environment variable NAG_KUSARI_FILE now needs to be set. This is done via START/Control Panel/System/Advanced/Environment Variables. From here create NAG_KUSARI_FILE if this environment variable does not exist. Append to the value of the environment variable the full hierarchical name of the file containing the licence. For example NAG_KUSARI_FILE might be set to just c:\program files\nag\licenses\naglic.txt if NAG_KUSARI_FILE did not exist before. Otherwise for example it might end up set to C:\program_files\naglic1.txt;c:\program files\nag\licenses\naglic.txt

In the latter case an alternative approach might have been to append the new licence key to the end of the licence file that already exists. (In the example above this would be C:\program_files\naglic1.txt.)

It is important to note that the licence management software searches only until a matching licence is recognized. If, for example, an expired licence is found in C:\program_files\naglic1.txt, the search will stop at this point even though a fresh licence is available in c:\program files\nag\licenses\naglic.txt. We therefore recommend that expired licences be removed from licence files as the licences expire.

f) Finally check that the licence is correctly installed by running a00acf example program. The Mark 21 DLLs have a program NAG_Fortran_DLL_info.exe in the Diagnostic subdirectory. This may also be run.

For specific technical advice in using NAG's products, please contact our technical experts.

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