June 2, 2005

          License server issue for Athena users off main MIT campus
 
For security reasons, we need to implement new license server
limitations that ensure that our license servers only issue licenses
to authorized MIT users. We plan to do this within 2 weeks of the date
of this message.

This will not directly affect users on the main MIT campus or in most
on-campus dorms, or users runnning applications on an on-campus
machine and displaying remotely through a Tether connection.

It is likely to affect you if you have your own Athena machine off the
main MIT campus or have an off-campus Linux machine that uses the OpenAFS
client to access locker software, and you use a commercial ISP.

If this issue affects you, you will get an error message like:

unable to get license - license server is down

and the application won't run.  The reason is that the license server
will be enforcing a limit to a set of IP address ranges for MIT
machines that commercial ISPs don't generally make available.

If you are affected, you can get around the problem by installing the
MIT-supported VPN client. Instructions are here: 

http://itinfo.mit.edu/product.php?name=openafs&platform=Linux

If you have problems connecting through the VPN you can get help via
the Unix/Linux Help Desk mailing list: unix-linux-help@mit.edu (OpenAFS users) 
or Athena Consulting: olc@mit.edu (users having a Linux Athena machine).

This message is in file /mit/tecplot/Athena/messages/net18 in case you 
want to read it again. You can address questions about this to the
3partysw@mit.edu mailing list.