Troubleshooting and FAQs

General

Question: My customer has used the licensed software for only one hour during the trial period. Will the software run beyond the expiration date?

The trial period starts ticking when the software is run for the first time. The number of hours or seconds remaining are not carried forward beyond the trial expiration period. Therefore, the trial license will expire on the expiration date, regardless of the number of hours, minutes, or seconds it was used during the trial period.

Question: Can a trial license be locked to a system?

Yes. You can lock a trial license to standalone systems, as well as License Managers, clients or both. The trial licenses can also be kept unlocked.

Question: How do the additive, aggregate, and exclusive trial licenses differ?

Switchover is not provided by an exclusive trial license, even if the next license is an exclusive trial license. When the license is exhausted, all running applications using an exclusive trial license will stop working and start throwing an error.

Whereas, an additive trial license will provide automatic switchover to the next trial license (additive, exclusive, or aggregate)—providing seamless application usage. Similarly, an aggregate trial license will provide automatic switchover to the succeeding trial license (exclusive or aggregate). Before using multiple trial licenses, refer to these guidelines.

Related to License Precedence

Question: Under which circumstances will zero precedence be set?

The zero precedence will be set automatically when the persistence data is either not created or corrupted. The system administrator can explicitly set zero precedence for trial licenses not meant to be used.

Related to Trial License Generation

Question: What will happen to the hard limit in the case of additive, exclusive, and aggregate trial licenses?

The hard limit of only the current license is applied.

Question: My customer wants to extend the 30-day trial period for 10 more days. Do I need to generate a trial license with 40 days or 10 days?

Prior to the 8.1 release, you had to generate licenses with cumulative trial duration to provide only the incremental duration. This means, to provide 10 days extension, you had to generate a 40-day trial license. However, now you need to generate subsequent licenses with incremental trial durations only. Therefore, you can generate a 10-day trial license for the same feature-version.

Question: How can I generate a license that is valid only between specific calendar dates?

Refer to the steps for generating a license: Generating a License Valid Between Fixed Calendar Dates.

NOTE   The license generated is normal and not trial.

Related to Time Tampering

Question: What impact will Daylight Saving Time have on time tampering enabled licenses?

By default, time tampering enabled licenses are able to handle the Daylight Savings Time (DST) changes.

Question: A trial license error is shown after the system clock was tampered with. How can customers overcome this state?

If you stopped issuing licenses in the case of system clock tampering (a setting can be made at the time of license generation), your customers will not be able to run the application after time tampering is detected. They need to report this to you, and you can provide them the utility to clean up their system and re-install the application and license. Also, refer to Persistence Data-Dependent License Models.

Related to Trial Exhaustion and Errors

Question: How can I alert my customer (preferably in advance) to announce that the trial is about to run out?

You can call the VLSgetTrialUsageInfo API function.
The Unified API-based licensing implementations can use the SNTL_QUERY_FEATURE_CUMULATIVE_TRIAL_INFO query type of sntl_licensing_get_info API to provide information about trial licenses.

Question: My customer’s licensed application has failed to communicate with the License Manager as the network went down. They could not release the license by exiting the application properly. The customer was using a trial hours-based network license. Will the trial usage continue to decrement?

Yes, but only up to a point. The trial license usage will not exceed the license lifetime period. The License Manager will release the license automatically if it does not receive an update call from the client (sent by the licensed application).

Question: How can my customer convert a trial license to a normal license in the field?

You can generate a new license and distribute it using simple methods, like an e-mail or a file (telephones are suitable for small short-numeric licenses only).

Question: My customer received error VLS_TRIAL_LIC_DATA_INCONSISTENT. What can be done?

This error will appear either when the system is not initialized for persistence data creation, or the trial persistence data is corrupted. The lsclean utility (available at ...\<version>\Legacy\VendorTools) should be used to restore the system settings. Refer to the topic on Persistence Data-Dependent License Models for more information about persistence and cleaning.