December 31, 2012
New and Easy License File Authorization
c‑treeACE is designed for ease of use from installation to administration—even the process of acquiring your licensing from the FairCom business team. c‑treeACE V10 has extended this ease of use to the final activation process… or now, elimination of it. No more hassles of the additional activation step. No serial number/key combinations to type or cut-and-paste. A simple file now enables a licensed c‑treeACE installation.
License Object
Beginning with c‑treeACE V10.0 an activation process is no longer required to use the c‑treeACE Server. A much simpler approach requiring only the presence of a new License Authorization File is now used. There are substantial advantages to this new approach. Primarily, it avoids an extra process to use the server and handling lengthy key values. More importantly, it avoids modifying any binary files, which can break package checksums, for example.
The License Authorization File is a binary file containing unique licensing information assigned by FairCom. This licensing information permits the c‑treeACE Server technology to operate on a specified operating system, to support specific features, to support a fixed number of concurrent users and/or connections to the c‑treeACE Server technology, and to utilize a fixed number of CPUs on the host machine.
The license file is named ctsrvr-<SN>.lic where <SN> is the unique Serial Number assigned to your server instance and provided by FairCom. This file will need to be properly placed in the same directory where the c‑treeACE Server binary is located, for example, \FairCom\V10*\<platform>\bin\ace\sql\ctreesql.exe. An example developer license is shown below:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="us-ascii"?>
<ctlicense version="2">
<version>10</version>
<serial>39000010</serial>
<OEM>1</OEM>
<lictype>Development</lictype>
<cpus>2</cpus>
<servtype>ALL (Standard - SQL)</servtype>
<users>32</users>
<private>EDE . . . QGP</private>
<checksum>LE47LG9DNM06IA30CGAFFO00NMCEJL59</checksum>
</ctlicense>
Note that you can read the most relevant sections of this XML file in plain text regarding serial numbers, connection and CPU counts. If this licensing file isn’t present, you’ll receive a 960 error in your CTSTATUS.FCS status log upon startup:
"LICENSE ERROR: License initialization failed: Missing license file."
The Developer edition of the c‑treeACE Server included with the c‑treeACE Professional package includes a ctsrvr-<SN>.licfile configured to support up to 32 concurrent connections and can operate on up to 2 concurrent CPU cores (as reported by the operating system which may include physical CPUs, CPU cores, or virtual CPUs assigned to a partition).
Development servers are licensed exclusively for development and testing purposes and only by the developer who is the c‑treeACE Professional license holder. They are expressly not authorized for production use. Should you need additional licenses for testing or if you wish to test with a license file supporting a greater number of connections or CPUs, please contact your nearest FairCom office.
When purchasing a production c‑treeACE Server license, you will receive a ctsrvr-<SN>.lic file via e-mail, along with a “Proof of Entitlement” document that summarizes the configuration of your c‑treeACE Server license file.