How does LM-X provide compatibility between different versions?

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Article ID: 75

Last Updated: 17th November 2010 02:34:36 pm

LM-X is designed to be platform independent and work on a number of platforms. Therefore, you can easily create licenses on one platform and use them on another. Similarly, you can run license servers on one platform and license clients on another. Due to this design, there are seldom any cross-platform problems.

It is important to understand that you cannot share compilable files between the platforms. Doing so will always lead to problems, such as compilation or runtime errors. The only file that can safely be shared between platforms is the security configuration file, vendor.lmx.

LM-X is also designed to be backwards compatible, so that new license servers can read existing license files and existing license clients. However, LM-X is not future compatible (see also article 73).

The following table shows compatibility between LM-X versions, where version 1 is older than version 2:

License Files/Clients	License servers	Compatible?
Version 1	Version 1	Yes
Version 1	Version 2	Yes
Version 2	Version 1	No

In addition, note that the license file cannot be newer than the LM-X version.

Essentially, LM-X backward compatibility works the same as for an application such as Word. For example, Word 2007 cannot read Word 2010 files, but Word 2010 can read Word 2007 files. To read the Word 2010 files in Word 2007, you would need to convert newer the newer files into an older format. LM-X works in this same manner. As long as the license server is the newest version, everything will work fine.

Note that two important changes have resulted in a need to use special switches for the License Generator to maintain compatibility:

When generating network licenses for clients using releases older than v3.5, use the switch xmllicgen -base32 to enable older clients to continue to work with v3.5.
To use the new license generator to generate a license file for a v3.3 license server, but for pre-v3.3 license clients, use the switch xmllicgen -oldhostid.