Reverse engineer LMTools server status enquiry

Question

We are using FlexLM/Flexera/LMTOOLS (not sure which is the correct) as a licens manager for our Autodesk products. I don't know what version the server is, but I have a fairly old client version, LMTOOLS v11.10.0.0. In this you can perform an enquiry and get a somewhat obscure text back as result which tells you what licenses are beeing used/checked out and by who.

I'm trying to programmatically do the same server status enquiry, and capture the response and use some regexp to figure out who is using specific licenses from our license pool.

I've tried to use Wireshark and Fiddler to sniff the network traffic and figure out how the client is talking to the server, but with no success.

So my question: is it even possible to make the same request in my own program (C#), and where can I learn more about it?

Thanks!

Answer 1

This is possible using the APIs available in the FlexNet Publisher SDK. I suggest you to consult the SDK documentation and contact Flexera support in case of problems.

In theory you could also observe the traffic between the client and the license server and deduce the packet format (this is known as "French Café technique" and was used to develop the Samba project), but this can be a pretty complex and long task.