Retry Licence Acquisition Overview

A new facility has been introduced to enable the repeated retries to acquire a licence. This occurs when the initial attempt fails for any reason and the Retry mechanism has been enabled. When enabled, and an attempt to get a licence fails, the PROIV Virtual Machine sleeps for the specified interval and then retries to acquire the licence. This is repeated until the duration period has been exceeded. If the final attempt to acquire the licence fails (which occurs after the duration has expired), the session terminates.

This Retry mechanism is controlled by two new PROIV Environment Variables:

LICENCE_SERVER_RETRY_INTERVAL - to specify the minimum interval between retries, in seconds.
LICENCE_SERVER_RETRY_DURATION - to specify the minimum time for retries to be attempted for, in seconds.

If LICENCE_SERVER_RETRY_INTERVAL is not specified or it is set to a non-numeric string, then there is no attempt to retry for a licence and failure on the first attempt results in the session being rejected. An interval time must be specified for this facility to be enabled. The minimum value that may be specified for the interval is 5 seconds and the maximum is 60 seconds. If the facility is not enabled then the LICENCE_SERVER_RETRY_DURATION variable is ignored and has no effect on the system.

If LICENCE_SERVER_RETRY_DURATION variable is not specified, or it is set to a non-numeric string, then the duration defaults to 10 times the specified interval. The minimum value that can be specified for the duration is the time specified for the interval plus one second, and the maximum is 3600 seconds (1 hour).

The LICENCE_SERVER_RETRY_DURATION variable can be set to zero which has a special meaning. If the LICENCE_SERVER_RETRY_DURATION is set to zero then there is no limit on the duration of the retries. This results in attempts to get the licence being repeated forever and the session never fails, but the session will not start up until a licence has been obtained. If this option is used with incorrect licensing details then the PROIV Virtual Machine may loop forever.

If a value, for either variable, is specified that is out of range (except for 0 for LICENCE_SERVER_RETRY_DURATION), then the nearest limit is used. For example, if a value less than the minimum is specified, then the minimum value is used, if a value greater than the maximum is specified, then the maximum is used.

Note: This facility is only implemented in the PROIV Virtual Machine and only supported when the VM is not used with a graphical client. Currently, the enhancement does work with the graphical client, but waits for an operator response after displaying the error message each time the retry fails to acquire a licence.

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Topic ID: 770015