Several of the Saratech AE’s were talking, and we all agreed that many of our support calls are licensing related, so we thought it would be a good idea to go over the licensing basics for our major software products.  So I’m going to go over the FEMAP licensing in this blog.  FEMAP has two main types of licenses, nodelocked and floating.

The nodelocked licenses are tied to a specific USB dongle, which is a small EPROM device that looks like a USB flash drive, and contains a tiny amount of memory, about 100 bytes or so.  This memory stores the FEMAP licensing information and serial number.  You can move this license to other machines, such as one desktop to another or a desktop to a laptop, but typically they just stay connected to one machine.  It’s important not to lose the dongle, since Siemens will charge a replacement fee for lost dongles.  If you do use a nodelocked license, there is no other software to install to license FEMAP.  That makes it easy to install the license, since you just have to put in two codes in FEMAP in the Help, About, Security menu command and then click OK.  Those codes are stored inside the EPROM memory inside the dongle. If you move the dongle to another machine, FEMAP should be ready to run once you plug in the dongle.

If you do use FEMAP on more than one machine, or have multiple seats of FEMAP, it is often easier and more efficient to use a floating license.  A floating license is tied to a license “server” machine which hands out the available license.  As long as you are on the same network as the license server, you can check out a license to run FEMAP.  If you need to use FEMAP from home, there are VPN solutions that will connect up to the network with the license server and allow the license to be checked out remotely.

FEMAP, unlike NX or Solid Edge, uses the “hostid” to tie the floating license to the license server machine.  The “hostid” is just the MAC address of the wired Ethernet card in the machine.  You can use the “ipconfig /all” command to list off the hostid of the machine from a Windows command window.  Just look for the 12 digit “Physical Address” under “Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:”.  The nice thing about using the MAC address, is that it usually won’t change when you make hardware changes to the workstation, such as graphics card, memory, or disk drives.  It should only change if you change out the Ethernet card.  If you have multiple wired Ethernet cards, it’s usually the first one that the license generator needs.

For the floating license, you will need to install the FEMAP license server software, which is based off FlexNet (Formally called FlexLM) software from Flexera, and then point the server to the FEMAP license file.  This server process then keeps track of how many licenses are running, and loans them out to each client machine running FEMAP. For each set of FEMAP license(s) on a given account (Sold-To), the license type (Floating or Nodelocked) must be the same.

As long as you are on Saratech Maintenance, you will be able to get new license files anytime, and you will get access to new versions of the software.  New versions will usually need a new license, and we are happy to get you a new license anytime you need to run the newer version of the software.  You can also get them directly from Siemens with your Webkey account if you prefer to do it that way.