Cognos license daemon hung

[Chris Sharman]

Unbelievable !
VMS has a deserved reputation for 365*24 reliability, and Cognos has always
represented Powerhouse as _the_ serious 4GL production tool for that
environment (and others).

We had our most serious incident for many months yesterday: the phones were
ringing off the hook from users who couldn't get into/out of Powerhouse.
After 20 minutes it was "big red button" time, as I killed the daemon (thereby
upsetting all the Powerhouse users that hadn't previously been impacted who
were still plugging away). And this is apparently a known problem that Cognos
and even some customers are happy to live with !

We've not seen it before, perhaps because we've only recently grown past 50
concurrent users.

Do tell about those internal audit procedures: I investigated ways of tracking
PH licence usage a while back, and all I found (maybe Arthur's suggestion?) was
reading & counting the licence daemon log entries. I wouldn't have any idea how 
else to track it, except maybe writing my own 'licence' server and calling it
via sitehook. My interest was capacity planning - not that different from
Cognos's interest I guess.

VMS has a proper production grade licensing system built in: I've never been
terribly comfortable with Flexlm (which makes substantial demands on DECnet),
but if it's unreliable then it's inexcusable for Cognos to fob us off with some
nasty bit of freeware to go with our fairly expensive copy of Powerhouse. You
can't say it's not under their control, because they choose whether to use it
or something better.

Chris (outraged of Preston) Sharman

>PH License Deamon software has always been a bit buggy on Alphas. The issue
>has never been resolved satisfactorily, because the software relies on
>Flexlm (which is not under Cognos control). Thus you have unavoidable
>arguments about where the problem is, i.e. is it with Cognos software or
>with Flexlm. One suggestion is to kill and restart the deamon with your
>nightly backup, since it takes only couple of minutes to do this. I have
>seen this procedure reduce the frequency of breakdowns, while not completely
>eliminating the chance of it happening. The only way to stop the problem
>completely is to get a demo key (which does not require the deamon). This
>option means however, that you need to update your keys about every 6
>months, as Cognos will not provide a long term demo key. You would also need
>to be a reasonable size company with sufficient internal audit procedures to
>make sure you are not abusing the trust provided by the "unlimited" nature
>of the demo key. You may also need to be very nice to your Cognos rep (e.g.
>take them out to a lavish lunch). Just joking!!!
______________________________________________________________________
Chris Sharman			Chris.Sharman@CCAgroup.co.uk
CCA Stationery Ltd, Eastway, Fulwood, Preston, Lancashire, PR2 9WS.
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