AutoDesk License Manager / FLEXNet Licensing

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I’m not really a fan of this FLEXNet licensing stuff. Mainly because I’m certain I don’t have a complete understanding of it, however, it shouldn’t be so seemingly overly complicated. Why is software working against me?!?

Had a server crash (power + UPS failure) that runs a Network License Manager for AutoDesk 2014. Upon getting the server back up, I had one particular user unable to load AutoCAD 2014 due to error -4.132.0.

Looking closer at this error and doing some initial debugging in the log file for LMTools, I see that a license was issued for a user on 7/7/2014, which is not this user in question.

Long story short, after an hour of going back and forth in documentation, trying things, testing, reading, testing, and finally Googling I came across a nice post that simply said to backup the adskflexborrow file from C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\FNPFLEXlm and start the FLEXNet License Server again.

Voila. User can run AutoCAD now without error.

Another note from a commenter that may be helpful; He notes:

We had a case where the client end of FlexLM thought it had borrowed a license when the server had lost that “borrow”. So we could not return it. Less of a problem but still wrong.
If you need to clear this case you can delete FlexLM’s record of the borrow on the client by deleting the keys in registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREFLEXlm License ManagerBorrow