Occasionally you may see the error “HostID of this machine: Invalid” when running the command rlmutil rlmhostid -ether

$ rlmutil rlmhostid ether
rlmutil v9.1
Copyright (C) 2006-2011, Reprise Software, Inc. All rights reserved.
Hostid of this machine: invalid
“`

How to resolve the  error “HostID of this machine: Invalid”

In order to obtain a permanent license key you need to provide the HostID of your machine. This is obtained by running the command above. Sometimes the error “HostID of this machine: Invalid”  will be seen.

This particular error is caused by the RLM Licensing server. The server uses the MAC address of a machine’s ethernet adapter to identify it. To do this  it attempts to locate eth0 on Posix systems and ether on Windows systems. Unfortunately network adapter names must follow these conventions for the licensing server to work. If you are seeing this message you need to check the name of your network adapter and if necessary rename it.

This limitation resides in the version of RLM that we use and a fix requires us to upgrade the version of RLM. However, licenses created with the latest version of RLM are not backwards compatible, requiring our customers to upgrade all of the licenses that they use. We are currently trying to determine if there is any other option for us as we don’t want to break thousands of systems for our customers. Therefore until we find an acceptable solution with Reprise Software, who own RLM, we have to advise our customers to rename their interfaces.