MKS Toolkit vs. Lawson Unix Utilities - Major problem

Very interesting thread. I'm left with several questions about my own environment...
I'm currently on 9.0.1.x on both app and env. We only run the financial package. and only portal (with LID only used for administration and the occasional debugging of issues).
Questions:
1) What are the issues being reported with LUU? Is it just on the upgrade, or certain modules?
2) What is all involved in switching to LUU at this point? How major of an undertaking are we talking about?
3) I've read about the uncertainty of the number of licenses needed. I don't want to take the trial and error method that MKS is presenting, as that seems like a pretty risky way of figuring out exactly what is needed. Any ideas what I need for a strictly portal/financials environment? one for each web user? one for each system account I may be using?
4) has anyone made any progress in gettng Lawson to "own up" to their portion of the licensing issue as of yet?
Brian Hynes

Very interesting thread. I'm left with several questions about my own environment...
I'm currently on 9.0.1.x on both app and env. We only run the financial package. and only portal (with LID only used for administration and the occasional debugging of issues).
Questions:
1) What are the issues being reported with LUU? Is it just on the upgrade, or certain modules?
2) What is all involved in switching to LUU at this point? How major of an undertaking are we talking about?
3) I've read about the uncertainty of the number of licenses needed. I don't want to take the trial and error method that MKS is presenting, as that seems like a pretty risky way of figuring out exactly what is needed. Any ideas what I need for a strictly portal/financials environment? one for each web user? one for each system account I may be using?
4) has anyone made any progress in gettng Lawson to "own up" to their portion of the licensing issue as of yet?
Brian Hynes

Brian,
Since you are on 9.0.1.x it should not be a concern.
It really only affects the upgrade from 8.0 to 9.x, 9.0.0 to 9.0.1 and a very small chance it could affect some scripts with EDI.
It is only an installation of LUU and MS SUA and should only be a couple hours max for you to perform.
Not sure on the users but think it is a per user of Lawson basis.
No, have not heard of Lawson owning up to it.
Hope this helps. Let me know if you need anything else.
Bill Mitchell
530.889.8550

Since you are on 9.0.1.x it should not be a concern at all.

It really only affects the upgrade from 8.0 to 9.x, 9.0.0 to 9.0.1 and a very small chance it could affects some scripts with EDI.

It is only an installation of LUU and MS SUA and should only be a couple hours max to perform.

Not sure on the users but think it is a per user of Lawson basis.

No, have not heard of Lawson owning up to it.



Bill Mitchell

Kastle Consulting



530-889-8550

bill.mitchell@kastleconsulting.com



”One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.” - Henry Miller



From: forums-lsf-s3-sys-admin@lawsonguru.com [mailto:forums-lsf-s3-sys-admin@lawsonguru.com]
Sent: Monday, June 13, 2011 2:21 PM
To: bill.mitchell@kastleconsulting.com
Subject: RE: MKS Toolkit vs. Lawson Unix Utilities - Major problem [00008417:00015892]




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RE: MKS Toolkit vs. Lawson Unix Utilities - Major problem


Posted by: brihyn
06/13/2011 03:09 PM


Very interesting thread. I'm left with several questions about my own environment...
I'm currently on 9.0.1.x on both app and env. We only run the financial package. and only portal (with LID only used for administration and the occasional debugging of issues).
Questions:
1) What are the issues being reported with LUU? Is it just on the upgrade, or certain modules?
2) What is all involved in switching to LUU at this point? How major of an undertaking are we talking about?
3) I've read about the uncertainty of the number of licenses needed. I don't want to take the trial and error method that MKS is presenting, as that seems like a pretty risky way of figuring out exactly what is needed. Any ideas what I need for a strictly portal/financials environment? one for each web user? one for each system account I may be using?
4) has anyone made any progress in gettng Lawson to "own up" to their portion of the licensing issue as of yet?
Brian Hynes

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Thank you,
LawsonGuru.com

brihyn,
I read Bill's reply, and he is spot on for all four points.

The further answer #3, there are a few ways you can calculate it, but MKS's method isn't trail and error. What's happening is they give you a decent number of time locked licenses, and see what your actual usage cap is.

This is NO different than what Lawson themselves did for the apps in LID. There is a column in 'licsta' that allows you to go over, and then they give you 30 days of license overage run time (eg: the grace period), and then they lock you down.

Their issue is that they never adapted that for portal usage. This may change with the new owners, because I know *I* would if I were them.

This is STILL how MicroFocus does it now, except on a server basis, and how BSI is starting to, again on a server basis. License compliance is becoming mandatory, and no longer on the honor system.

Pay-for-usage and pay-as-you-go (aka SaaS model) is where it's all going.

...but I digress

Now to beverly,
Not exactly. There are TWO issues here. One is a technical one, the other is a legal one.

The technical one:
SUA's implementation of several UNIX tools is weak, at best. This creates major issues for any script that expects proper POSIX compliance, and correct operation. Specific examples are as follows:
1) 'ls -1' does not always produce a single column list. At times (randomly) it will act exactly as 'ls'. This can botch programs that need to parse the single column.
2) 'ksh' doesn't always properly pass file handles, output through pipes, etc. Again, this can break scripts that are otherwise coded correctly.

This affects LUU, since Lawson really is stub calling the backend binaries. This is mainly done so Lawson can hide the location differences between implementations. Essentially they are virtualising.

Personally, it would have been easier if they would have picked up a copy of bin-utils, and static complied them, or made cygwin a third option, but again, I digress...

Now, the legal issue:
When MKS switched from the honor system, to a strict named user licensing model, the long taken as truth "you only need one license" was proven untrue. at that point, MKS realized they had between 10-15 years of de facto violations of license agreement, because Lawson has had a Windows port since 1996.
MKS had to at that point decide how to proceed. Since Lawson has never *directly* sold MKS, they were off the hook *directly*, so MKS is faced with the same question SCO was...do they go after EVERYONE, big or small, or do they make a peace offering. They essentially went with the peace offering, since they realised clients didn't *intentionally* violate the license agreement, because no one really knows how Lawson uses the tools, and how that usage has changed internally over the last 15 years.

The key is this: MY UNDERSTANDING OF THEIR INTENT (I'm NOT Rick or MKS legal), is that MKS is agreeing to waive the 'legal' issue by rectifying the licensing issue for the present usage. In exchange, they are solving your 'technical' issue, since MKS is THE number one SUPPORTED UNIX interop, and has been for almost two decades (if memory serves me well).

Now with that said, if you choose NOT to agree to their peace offering, the legal waters get messy, and as I'm NOT a lawyer, I can't speculate one what happens. What I do know is they *do* have a legal leg to stand on, but against whom (the client or Lawson), I do not know.

It's even tricker, since MKS was just acquired by PTC, and Lawson is being acquired by Infor (et al).

Personally, with the generous discounts, it's not worth the potential legal wrangling. But I'm not the client, so that's just my high level view on it all.

Just remember, even if you switch to LUU *now*, you don't resolve the *past* violations, only any future infringement. It would take a lawyer to review Novell vs SCO vs IBM (the closest case I can think of), to see how this would play out in the extreme case lawsuit were filed.

If anyone has any questions, feel free to contact me on it off-topic.
Kwane

I agree wholeheartedly with Kwane's comments (they do say great minds think alike, right? ) :).

In particular, I would add that if you do ANY scripting at all or use EDI, do not use LUU. You are wasting your time and not saving your organization any money.

If you do switch to LUU, you are rolling the dice with regard to past legal infringement. Sometimes it's easier to just pay up--whether you're right or wrong--and move on.

From: forums-lsf-s3-sys-admin@lawsonguru.com [mailto:forums-lsf-s3-sys-admin@lawsonguru.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 15, 2011 09:30 PM
To: John Henley
Subject: RE: MKS Toolkit vs. Lawson Unix Utilities - Major problem [00008417:00015935]

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RE: MKS Toolkit vs. Lawson Unix Utilities - Major problem
Posted by: Kwane McNeal
06/15/2011 10:30 PM
brihyn,
I read Bill's reply, and he is spot on for all four points.

The further answer #3, there are a few ways you can calculate it, but MKS's method isn't trail and error. That's happening is they give you a decent number of time locked licenses, and see what your cap is.

This is NO different than what Lawson themselves did for the apps in LID. There is a column in 'licsta' that allows you to go over, and then they give you 30 days of over run time, and then they lock you down.

Their issue is that they never adapted that for portal usage. This may change with the new owners, because I know *I* would if I were them.

This is STILL how MicroFocus does it now, except on a server basis, and how BSI is starting to, again on a server basis. License compliance is becoming mandatory, and no longer on the honor system.

Pay-for-usage and pay-as-you-go (aka SaaS model) is where it's all going.

...but I digress

Now to beverly,
Not exactly. There are TWO issues here. One is a technical one, the other is a legal one.

The technical one:
SUA's implementation of several UNIX tools is weak, at best. This creates major issues for any script that expects proper POSIX compliance, and correct operation. Specific examples are as follows:
1) 'ls -1' does not always produce a single column list. At times (randomly) it will act exactly as 'ls'. This can botch programs that need to parse the single column
2) 'ksh' doesn't properly pass file handles, output through pipes, etc. Again, this can break scripts coded correctly otherwise.

This affects LUU, since Lawson really is stub calling the backend binaries. This is mainly done so Lawson can hide the location differences between implementations. Essentially they are virtualising.

Personally, it would have been easier if they would have picked up a copy of bin-utils, and static complied them, or made cygwin a thrid option, but I digress, again...

Now, the legal issue:
When MKS switched from the honor system, to a strict named user licensing model, the long taken as truth "you only need one license" was proven untrue. at that point, MKS realized they had between 10-15 years of de facto violations of license agreement, because Lawson has had a Windows port since 1996.
MKS had to at that point decide how to proceed. Since Lawson has never *directly* sold MKS, they were off the hook *directly*, so MKS is faced with the same question SCO was...do go after EVERYONE, big or small, or do I make a peace offering. They essentially went with the peace offering, since they realised clients didn't *intentionally* violate the license agreement, because no one really knows how Lawson uses the tools, and how that usage has changed internally over the last 15 years.

The key is this: MY UNDERSTANDING OF THEIR INTENT (I'm NOT Rick or MKS legal), is that MKS is agreeing to waive the legal issue by rectifying the licensing issue. In exchange, they are solving your 'technical' issue, since MKS is THE number one SUPPORTED UNIX interop, and has been for almost two decades (if memory serves me well).

Now with that said, if you choose NOT to agree to their peace offering, the legal waters get messy, and as I'm NOT a lawyer, I can't speculate one what happens. What I do know is they have a legal leg to stand on, but against whom (the client or Lawson), I do not know.

Personally, with the generous discounts, it's not worth the potential legal wrangling. But I'm not the client, so that's just my high level view on it all.

Just remember, even if you switch to LUU *now*, you don't resolve the *past* violations, only any future infringement. It would take a lawyer to review Novell vs SCO vs IBM, to see how this would play out in the extreme case a lawsuit were filed.

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Thank you,
LawsonGuru.com

Thanks for the information. I do realize that we need to legally pay for past years usage, and that's only fair to Rick and MKS. However I'm also doing my own due-diligence to make sure I provide the correct information to the people within my organization making the decisions, and after going through our original contract with Lawson, we need to have our own dialog with our sales rep before jumping to pay this un-budgeted expense. This is not at all to say that MKS is not owed money for their product, however I only learned of the scope of this isue last week when perusing LasonGuru to resolve my own separate MKS licensing issue.

My real issue is how I want to proceed going forward. At this point, my own discussions with Rick have been nothing short of showing that MKS (or at least Rick, as a representative of MKS) is not willing to provide the support we paid for on a separate license of their software for an entirely separate installation of the software. Again, I realize that licensing fees are owed to MKS, however my requests for support have been completely ignored, or, when not ignored, directly refused. And as a result, if I can avoid this level of non-support in the future without issue, as well as remove one piece of non-lawson software in the behemoth that is a lawson system, all the better.

But I digress. Back to the issue at hand..I'm working to build a new Lawson system (as I have on and off for the past 6-8 months). Will LUU be sufficient for a brand new installation to get all of the Lawson installations completed?

Brian,

This is perhaps not the best place for this discussion, but you have left me no option but to respond.

You contacted MKS and told us that you are receiving a message indicating that you have exceded the maximum number of activations, on a single Named User license of MKS Toolkit.

And, instead of deactivating this license from the current machine and then activating it on the new machine:

http://www.mkssoftware.com/docs/activation/

Which would have avoided your contacting MKS, you are asking MKS to "reset" the serial number so that it can be activated, for a "final time".

Then, while I was looking into your question, I receive two emails containing LawsonGuru.com posting to this topic - date/time stamps: 06/13/2011 03:09 PM and 06/13/2011 03:26 PM, and in both you are stating:

"I don't want to take the trial and error method that MKS is presenting"

While you are also asking questions about moving to LUU.

Your words made me think back to your request to "reset" your single Named User license for an additional activation, because you are receiving an activations exceeded notice.
 
As well as your comment for a "final time"

I ask myself how might this be the "final time" that you will need to activate this license? 

I come to the conclusion that you - might - be planning to use MKS Toolkit to install LUU, and you then you plan to remove MKS Toolkit for good - before - you have taken care of your organization's likely past and current MKS Toolkit over use issues, and while you also "don't want to take the trial and error method that MKS is presenting".

Finally -

I offered a second option to settle for likely past and current MKS Toolkit over use, that would not require our "trial and error method" and received no response to this idea.  But, I did receive another request from you to reset your license. 

So, I then asked for something in writing, from someone who can legally represent your organization, confirming that you folks will continue to work with MKS to cover for likely past and current over use of MKS Toolkit, in trade for my assistance.  To date I received no such confirmation. 

Brian, I am happy to cooperate, in return for cooperation.

Sincerely,

Rick Willhite
703-803-4366
Rick.Willhite@mks.com

Brian,
Concerning LUU:
- Lawson Installation: Technically, yes
- Operation: Possibly, *unless* you need to run an App upgrade, EDI, FaxIntegrator, PFI, or custom scripts.
- LID Users: Probably not more than one or two

To beverly,
I got around to installing LUU on a test system today, and I did notice a very undocumented feature (or I just missed the documentation). Lawson has rearchitected LUU to have the ability to point to ANY UNIX InterOp, including both CygWin and potentially statically compiled GNU bin-utils.

I don't think they intend to allow clients to deploy it yet, but it's not too difficult to get it to work, as is.

Kwane

Rick-
As to continue taking our conversation out of the public forum, I have replied directly back to you again. I do ask that, if you continue to doubt that I am working on two entirely separate issues (one being your licensing needs, the separate being the need of a named-user reset), I simply ask you to search for all posts here on LawsonGuru that I have made. You will see that I have been working on building a new Lawson system since last fall, Working to try to create some form of documentation. As such, I have removed and reinstalled every piece of software many times, to the point of starting from scratch with an OS reload.
As for the final time question, as you see in my email, I need to know how to simply back up the licensing information (I believe there must be a way to create a license.dat file?) so that if I need to reload yet again, which seems pretty likely, the MKS licensing portion of my reinstall at least won't be an issue.

Finally, a huge thank you to everyone on LawsonGuru once again, for not just helping me out in this licensing and LUU thread, but in helping me get as far along with this server build as I finally am. I'm glad to say that after about 4 months of working on this in my free time, I've finally made it past the Websphere issues I was posting early in the year

I know it should be an entirely different thread, but does anyone know how to reset my net-express license? That's the next hurdle!
-Brian

Call your lawson rep to reset your netexpress license.

We have just upgraded from LSF 9.0.0 to 9.0.1 and went from MKS to LUU with the upgrade.  We have found that went printing our ACH receipts it is taking ALOT longer to spool and on the bigger files it is printing 2 copies.  We believe the duplicate copies are occuring due to the timeout being set to 60 seconds in the ServerIOTimeout in the Websphere Plugin.  We have increased the timeout but it is taking 40 minutes to spool our receipts when it used to take 1-2 minutes on LSF 9.0.0.  I am not sure where this issue lies but saw this post - thinking it may be an issue with LUU.  Did you ever get any conclusive information?  Any input is appreciated!

Check lawson announcement # CN-LSF90x-20110519

There are some fixes from microsoft you can download to help with LUU issues

Thank you for the CN# tip Jimmy!

Go to the MyLawson.com. Select Critical Notifications option under the Get Support tab. Filter on S3 and Windows. It will come up, date is 5/19/2011.

Posted By Kwane McNeal on 06/15/2011 11:30 PM Personally, it would have been easier if they would have picked up a copy of bin-utils, and static complied them, or made cygwin a third option, but again, I digress...

Lawson has issued an update to LUU to work with cygwin as a full replacement for MKS (see Lawson KB Article ID 5422254).

Lawson just came out with a pretty decent manual for installing LUU + Cygwin. KB 5438494.

FYI: I would redownload the LUU install from lawson. The name of the file did not change, but the size of the file changed.

 RE: the move from mks to luu. Read KB article over and over and think that you need win 2008 'R2' with Cygwin if you want to use LUU and be able to do upgrades.. if 'upgrades' means lawson version upgrades, we are o.k. because non planned..but if it means ctp's ..that is a concern.

is it possible to get away from mks while staying with win2008 sp2. we are apps 9.0.1 (msp5) and enviro 9.0.1 (sp7)

"Upgrades on Windows using LUU instead of MKS Toolkit are supported for Technology releases LSFCT 9.0.1 SP7 or higher, on Windows 2008 R2 only, and only with the LUU Cygwin/Alternate Shell configuration."

So this affects impexp and importdb only?

ANY file-based action that updates the database, is bound to 8-12 records a sec

I know this is a very old topic, however, I am having problems with MKS Toolkit and gpg4win....has anyone used these hand in hand for encryption and decryption?