A.P. Lawrence

This article is from a FAQ concerning SCO operating systems. While some of the information may be applicable to any OS, or any Unix or Linux OS, it may be specific to SCO Xenix, Open Desktop or Openserver.

There is lots of Linux, Mac OS X and general Unix info elsewhere on this site: Search this site is the best way to find anything.

TCP/IP and NFS FAQ

Why do I have a license for Morning Star PPP and how do I use it (OSR507)?

To install Morningstar PPP, you need to first remove the SCO PPP Runtime drivers. Fire up Custom, drill into the Openserver product. Connectivity, TCP/IP, and remove the PPP Runtime utilities and drivers. Then install Morning Star PPP, and after it is done, brand the kernel with the license number you were given

 brand -a "license data" licensenumber licensecode
 # example, not actual license
 brand -a "k0;ma8f56d" 3CJ0021234 ewgiopuyt

Evan Hunt explained why (October 2003):

We rewrote the licensing system in 5.0.7, and it was fine during testing, but then there was a last-minute bugfix to correct something else, which introduced a last-minute bug that broke Morning Star, and no one discovered it until literally the day we shipped. The problem is that Morning Star still uses the *old* licensing library (because otherwise it would not have been installable on 5.0.6 and previous), and there's a subtle incompatibility.

Here's what's supposed to happen: If you have an enterprise license, MST PPP should just work. So when you install it, it checks your system, sees that you have an enterprise license, and therefore doesn't ask you to enter an MSTPPP license. That part works fine. However, the pppd binary itself, which is built with the old licensing library, fails to recognize the enterprise license correctly, so it refuses to run.

Now, pppd can still recognize single-purpose MSTPPP licenses just fine, so you need to install one of those. It's just a shame custom is using the *new* libraries, and is therefore too clever to ask you for one. :(

The way we worked around this was to ship an MSTPPP license along with every enterprise license, so you still get the same licenses, but not bundled in one like they're supposed to be. I think the MST license is on the same certificate; if not, it's nearby. Brand the system with that, and MST will start working. In the next release of MST (no date for that yet, but probably within a year), I will have rebuilt it to use the new licensing libraries and this will no longer be a problem.

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