10 License in a Cloud Computing Environment

The token server may be deployed in a cloud environment. The main challenge in deploying a token server in the cloud is to guarantee that the hostid (in this case the MAC address) stays unchanged when the instance running the token server is stopped.

In the following section we discuss one possible deployment strategy on Amazon EC2.

10.1 Example: Token server in Amazon EC2

The license will be bound to a MAC address. In the most basic Amazon EC2 instance setup the MAC address may change when the instance is stopped and later started again. Below we describe how to work around this.

In Amazon EC2 a MAC address is a persistent resource associated with an Elastic Network Interface (ENI). To keep the MAC address constant we advise creating an ENI that can then be associated with the Amazon EC2 instance acting as a token server. The ENI can later be moved to another instance within the same subnet if the token server needs to be moved to another instance.

Creating a token server Amazon EC2 instance

  1. Create an ENI in the subnet into which you wish to launch the token server. Please consult the Amazon EC2 documentation for how to create an ENI.

  2. Create a new instance in the same subnet as the ENI. When configuring the network interface select the newly created ENI as a network interface.

  3. Launch the instance.

  4. (optional) If the machine needs a public IP address then create an Elastic IP (EIP) and associate it with the instance after launch. It is not possible to have an automatically assigned public IP addresses when using an ENI in Amazon EC2.

  5. Install MOSEK on the instance.

  6. Retrieve the MAC address associated with the ENI, e.g by inspecting the ENI in the AWS Management Console or by logging into the instance and following the instructions in Sec. 6 (Hostname and Hostid).

  7. Contact support@mosek.com with the relevant MAC address to obtain a valid license file.

  8. Make sure the security group associated with the instance running the token server allows for incoming traffic to the token server. Allow for inbound TCP traffic on the ports your token server is listening as shown in Sec. 7.3 (Changing default ports and firewall and antivirus issues)

  9. Install the token server as described in Sec. 7 (Floating license setup).