System alerts when licenses are not available

The first warning will appear as a message in the online.log and will also trigger an alarm event, severity 3 (ATTENTION), class 29 (LICENSING), through the ALARMPROGRAM script. The instance will continue to try to obtain the necessary licenses every 10 seconds but it will not constantly emit warnings. The next warning will be 5 minutes after the license expired or became unavailable, then 10 minutes, then 20, and then 40 minutes. After these initial warnings, the alerts will continue to be produced on an hourly basis until 24 hours has passed from the time the licensing became non-compliant. If no licenses have been obtained during that time, then the server will write a message to the log to indicate it is shutting down, issue a severity 4 alarm (EMERGENCY), and then shutdown the instance.

In order to bring the server back to compliance, it would be necessary to regenerate a licence.xml file. For more information, see HCL Informix Licensing.

To aid troubleshooting of licensing issues, the environment variable IFX_LM_LOG can be set (to any value) before starting the instance. This will cause extra information regarding the licensing sub-system to be printed to the file pointed to by the instance’s CONSOLE parameter. For example, if the current license allocation has recently expired, the following messages will be displayed:
2025-12-18 12:33:07 LICENSING: <Verbose data> VerifyLicense:1

and in the online.log, you would see the following message:

12:33:07  Current licenses have expired. Grace Period started.

          HCL Informix Dynamic Server requires licenses for the CPU/TENANT
          VP resources to operate. When current licenses expire, they enter
          into a Grace Period.
          When the Grace Period ends, the server must shut down.
          Please renew the licenses as soon as possible.