Using EDA tools at home

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Need to use your company EDA tools from home, here are some tips:

1) First of all, the most important solution is to speak to your EDA vendor, I am sure all have solutions for you and some even give you a free temporary license (if you are an existing customer).
2) If you have a node locked license, simply take the dongle home.
3) If you have a MAC based license then try to spoof the MAC address on your home PC. If this fails, buy a cheap USB Wifi dongle from eBay and try again. I would recommend not using a USB Ethernet cable dongle as they tend to go into low power mode when no cable is plugged in and you will loose your MAC address (goes to FFFFFFFFFFFF)
4) If you use a floating license at work then ask your IT to set up a VPN connection so that you can check out a license at home. Once you have a connection you can use:

lmutil lmstat -a

to see how many licenses are available, and

lmutil lmstat -A

to see who has checked out a license.

5) Moving a license server home is very easy. Just make sure you have the license file, license key and license utilities. For Flexnet/Flexlm, which the majority of EDA vendors use you only need 2 (Linux) or 3 (Windows) executables. You need lmgrd(.exe) which is the license server and the daemon which is supplied by your EDA vendor. For windows you also need lmtools.exe to setup the license server. The license key is as per point 2 and 3.
6) If you are not allowed to take the dongle home or they are shared by multiple engineers then use one of those "USB over Ethernet" utilities. Make sure you pick one that works with USB dongles (not all do).
7) Some node locked licenses do not allow you to use Windows RDP (remote desktop)
# ** License Issue: Cannot checkout an uncounted license within a Windows Terminal Services guest session.
Fortunately this is only applies to RDP, TightVNC, Logmein, Teamviewer etc all work fine!

As I mentioned number 1 is the option you should start with, I would NOT and I stress this point, use a hacked license/daemon! Not only are you risking getting all sorts of nasties on your PC (which you use to access your bank right?) some EDA vendors can actually track where their software is used. They might not sue you at this time but they do remember.

And a final note, some of the above suggestions could be somewhat questionable wrt your license agreement, if you are worried speak to your EDA vendor, there is no point in breaking your license agreement as I am sure your EDA vendor will help you out.

Happy working from home (I have been for the past 20 years...)
 

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