Network Licenses Over a WAN or VPN

I’m writing this down because I ALWAYS forget it, and it just happened to me again the other day. I was trying to open Revit and the license server was really far away in another office and I kept getting a pop up saying “A valid license could not be obtained by the network license manager.” I could ping the license server, I could browse to it, but no license.

After pulling some hair out (not much left) I remembered the FLEXLM_TIMEOUT variable.

Granted, you aren’t supposed to try to access your Autodesk license server (FlexLM) over a wide area network or VPN, but sometimes it just makes sense. If you have to access your license remotely, the FIRST THING you want to do is tweak your FLEXLM_TIMEOUT environment variable.

This article says it’s for AutoCAD, but it’s really for almost all their software that uses the FlexLM server, and it does a great job of laying out the steps and recommendations for Windows 7. Here’s where to find them in Windows 10 and 8…Read more