How to allow a Flex enabled service to checkout from trusted storage

Summary

This article will help to allow your flex enabled service checkout licenses from trusted storage.

Synopsis

This article will help to allow your flex enabled service checkout licenses from trusted storage.

Discussion

If you are creating an application that is to be run as a service and that service needs to checkout a license from trusted storage, then you may hit a problem where there are not enough permission to check the license out.

?Not enough rights to talk to service. Set service to start automatically to resolve this.?

Simply changing the permission on the service will not help in this instance as the problem lies with the permission of the user to start the FNPLicensingService from your service.

The reason for activation initialization error is due to ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED error when FlexNet licensing service is started/queried. This happens when Flex-enabled application runs as a service with user account privileges only. The user level accounts are not granted permissions to start and stop the services, by default.

One needs to use the Security Descriptor Definition Language (SSDL) to provide the required service privileges. Since, the ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED is seen for Flexnet licensing service it is required to grant an explicit permission to start and stop this service for the given user account.

Following is an example using SetACL utility(SetACL can be found at http://helgeklein.com/) for user account test123.

SetACL.exe -on "Flexet Licensing Service" -ot srv -actn ace -ace "n:test123;p:start_stop"

Running SetACL against the user should allow the start/stop of the licensing service.

How to allow a Flex enabled service to checkout from trusted storage