Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!PAN.SSEC.HONEYWELL.COM!thompson
From: thompson@PAN.SSEC.HONEYWELL.COM (John Thompson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: re: problems with apollo's running mentor software
Message-ID: <9010091832.AA00343@pan.ssec.honeywell.com>
Date: 9 Oct 90 18:32:02 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 37


Dave Krowitz writes regarding Mentor 'not authorized' errors--
> Not being a Mentor user, I am simply speculating about the cause of
> your problem ...
> 
> It occurs to me that if the time/date of the workstations running copies
> of /etc/ncs/glbd (the NCS Global Location Broker Daemon) differ by more
> than 5 minutes, ....

Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with anything logical or reasonable.  

Mentor has an authcode file that contains lists of authorized software for 
nodeIDs and packages, with the expiration date and encrypted key.  They 
check this every time you enter a Mentor application.

If the date has been modified on-the-fly (i.e. without a reboot), Mentor
decided to treat it as a "you must be trying to break our authorization"
error, and prevents you from running.  The fact that you can "get around"
this feature by rebooting didn't seem to impress upon them the stupidity
of the feature.

In fact, the original reason we first ran the 'timed' was to get our
nodes back _IN_ time-synch so the glbd wouldn't complain about time
skew warnings!  Mentor plain and simple blew it on this.  Everyone
that I've talked to at Mentor has agreed that it's stupid (I won't name
names :-) and that it shouldn't have been there.  They've also stated
(publicly at MUG-90) that this brain-dead feature would be removed at
release 8.0.  Now, when hell freezes over and release 8.0 finally hits
beta, we might find out whether that's true!

John Thompson (jt)
Honeywell, SSEC
Plymouth, MN  55441
thompson@pan.ssec.honeywell.com

As ever, my opinions do not necessarily agree with Honeywell's or reality's.
(Honeywell's do not necessarily agree with mine or reality's, either)