Licenses on a Sentinel license server

By default, clients can access all Sentinel license servers running in the same subnet. If you operate several subnets or want to restrict the access of clients to a license server, you have to control the access accordingly.

Important: This topic applies to Sentinel license servers only.

License server communication

Communication between a license server and the respective clients requires TCP/IP. To detect a license server, clients use UDP broadcasts. Further communication uses TCP.

Make sure incoming and outgoing network traffic for TCP port 1947 and UDP port 1947 is allowed between the license server and the respective clients.

Note: IPv4 sockets are always open, IPv6 sockets are open only if IPv6 is available.

License server access

To control access to the license server, you have the following options:

  • Configure licensing across subnets: Configure clients such that they perform a broadcast search across the whole network when trying to obtain a license.

  • Restrict access on the server side: Configure a Sentinel license server such that only specific clients can access it.

  • Restrict access on the client side: Configure a client such that it can access only a subset of the available license servers.

The license server has to run permanently. It does not necessarily need a PLA 3.0 installation. For terminal server solutions, this could be the terminal server itself.

Tip: To view all Sentinel keys available on the license server, open the PLA License Control Center in a browser at http://127.0.0.1:1947, and open the Sentinel keys menu. The list displays software and hardware keys connected locally to your computer, and keys that are shared by other computers in your local network.
To see whether a license file has been correctly applied, you can open the PLA License Control Center. Licenses from Stegmann Systems always have the vendor code 98099 assigned.
Figure 1. Correctly applied license file displayed in the PLA License Control Center