Date: July 31, 2013

After upgrading (via yum) from F18 to F19, I am having matlab license manager problems. The message I get when I type "matlab" is: 

License checkout failed.
License Manager Error -95
MATLAB is unable to connect to the license server. 
Make sure you can resolve the hostname of your machine. 
If you are unable to resolve the hostname, contact your System Administrator.

Troubleshoot this issue by visiting: 
http://www.mathworks.com/support/lme95b

Diagnostic Information:
Feature: MATLAB 
License path: /u1/Mathworks_2007b_64/etc/license.dat:/u1/Mathworks_2007b_64/etc/*.lic: 
FLEXnet Licensing error: -95,378. System Error: 115

Some time ago I decided to bite the systemd bullet for this and created a file /lib/systemd/system/matlab-lm.service. This used to allow me to do things like: 

systemctl start matlab-lm.service
systemctl status matlab-lm.service
systemctl enable matlab-lm.service
Indeed when I try to start the service I get: 
Job for matlab-lm.service failed. See 'systemctl status matlab-lm.service' and 'journalctl -xn' for details.
There is nothing useful in /var/log/messages or the output from journalctl, so I look at the service file and find out what command to try to run by hand, which is: 
/u1/Mathworks/etc/lmstart -u tom -c /u1/Mathworks/etc/license.dat
Even this is not helpful, but by running "lmstart -e", I discover that the license manager keeps some kind of logfile in /var/tmp/lm_TMW.log. One error in this log is: 
(MLM) ERROR: Non-activation-capable daemon activation invoked with non-client-request event type
The word on this is that this is benign and can be ignored (it goes away if you have a more recent version of the license manager).

It turns out that "lmstart" is a 864 line bash script. It in turn invokes "lmboot" which is a 1409 line bash script. This in turn pulls in "util/setlmenv.sh" which is 2091 lines of bash utilities.

After putting lots of echo statements in strategic places in these bash scripts, I am finding that a -f $FILE test that should yield true is yielding false for no reason that I can see.

Ping cannot be run

In the process of troubleshooting the above, I find that I again have this trouble (this happened back when I upgraded to F18 also). I can run the ping command as root, but as an ordinary user I get: 
ping: icmp open socket: Operation not permitted

And the fix is exactly the same as for F18: 

yum reinstall iputils
After doing this, ping works just fine for an ordinary user.
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org