What is Sentinel HASP license manager? #
HASP stands for Hardware Against Software Piracy. Aladdin Knowledge Systems, founded in 1985, built it as its flagship product. Vector Capital acquired Aladdin in 2009 and placed it under SafeNet, with the two formally merged in 2010. Gemalto agreed to acquire SafeNet in 2014, and Thales completed its acquisition of Gemalto on 2 April 2019. That is why one product answers to four names across an estate: HASP, SafeNet Sentinel, Gemalto Sentinel, and Sentinel LDK.
Operationally it has two halves. A protection key holds the entitlement, either a Sentinel HL hardware dongle (formerly HASP HL) or a Sentinel SL software key bound to a machine. A License Manager then hands out access to what that key allows. Thales has succeeded Sentinel HASP with the Sentinel HL family and states that the new keys are “fully backwards compatible with existing Sentinel HASP implementations.”
For most license administrators, the only License Manager that matters is the Admin License Manager, installed as part of the Run-time Environment (RTE).
Point a browser at http://localhost:1947 and you reach the Sentinel Admin Control Center: the protection keys currently available on the network, the Features each key allows access to, the users logged in to each key, and the controls for detaching a license.
Licensing models Sentinel HASP supports #
Sentinel LDK assigns license terms per Feature rather than per product, so one application can carry several Features on different terms.
| License term | Wie es funktioniert | What it means for the pool |
|---|---|---|
| Ewige | The Feature “can be used an unlimited number of times for an unlimited period of time” | Nothing expires, so nothing forces a review. Over-provisioning here stays invisible. |
| Time Period | Expires a set number of days after first use | The renewal date depends on when someone first ran it, not when you bought it |
| Verfallsdatum | Expires on a specific date | The one term a renewal calendar can track directly |
| Execution Count | Expires after a set number of product executions | Consumption rather than time. It drains quietly and gives no warning before it runs out. |
| Concurrency (network seats) | A shared pool of simultaneous instances, defined separately for each Feature | “Network seats are not assigned to specific users.” First come, first served, then a denial. |
| Detachable | A network seat checked out to a local machine for offline use | “The license is deducted from the pool of available network seats” for the whole detach period |
The last two rows are where the work sits. Concurrency produces a hard denial the moment the pool runs dry, and that denial usually arrives as a ticket. A seat checked out for a site visit leaves the pool for days whether the laptop is open or in a bag. Unlike a concurrency denial, which generates an immediate complaint, a detached seat quietly erodes available capacity and can remain unnoticed until license shortages become a recurring operational problem.
Applications and software vendors using Sentinel HASP #
The software vendor picks Sentinel HASP, not the customer. Most teams find out it is in the estate when a dongle stops working. Publicly documented users include:
- FARO, whose knowledge base documents the Sentinel HASP license driver and the Sentinel License Manager service for its metrology and laser scanning software.
- Trimble Business Center, whose help covers “the configuration of a Sentinel HASP network key with a multi-user license,” administered through the Sentinel Admin Control Center.
- Digital Surf MountainsMap, whose network licensing guide names the “Sentinel LDK License Manager (hasplms)” service and the port 1947 firewall rule.
- Caldera, which publishes its own guide to how Sentinel LDK communicates on the network for its large-format print software.
Those four are engineering and technical tools outside the big CAD and CAE suites, which mostly run FlexNet or a house license manager. If the estate includes metrology, survey, geospatial or print production software, look for a Sentinel HASP key.
How Open iT supports Sentinel HASP license manager #
Open iT tracks Sentinel HASP as a Level 1 (Runtime Usage) configuration in LicenseAnalyzer™. An Open iT Core Client runs on the Sentinel HASP license server and collects two independent streams.
Utility polling queries the Sentinel HASP API, the same address the Admin Control Center serves, in the form SentinelHASP http://localhost:1947. It samples every five minutes and rolls up hourly, producing five data types for historical reporting: Host User License Use, OLAP Raw Hourly, OLAP User Concurrency, Usergroup License Use v3.0 and OLAP Total Use.
Log file parsing collects the access logs the License Manager writes, by default to C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Aladdin Shared\HASP\log on Windows and /var/hasplm/ on Linux. It runs every five minutes. Record logs produce the datatypes Total, Individual, Usergroup, Host and Hostgroup License Use. Event logs produce License Logfile Events v2.0 and Denied License Use, which is the one to watch.
Three configuration points decide whether the reports are usable:
- Switch the access log on. Admin Control Center, Configuration, Basic Settings, “Write an Access Log File.” Until that is on, the License Manager writes nothing, and the parser has nothing to collect. There is no way to recover the months it was off.
- Rename the IDs. In Sentinel LDK, Open iT collects the vendor license ID as the vendor license and the feature ID as the feature. Left alone, the reports come back full of numbers. product-rename.map and feature-rename.map turn them into names people recognize.
- Supply the entitlement counts. The collected data does not include the number of available licenses. available-licenses.map is where they are set. Without it you have usage with no denominator, and no way to say whether a pool is oversized.
Polling and parsing answer how many seats were checked out, by whom, and who got denied. Neither answers whether the person holding a seat was doing anything with it, and a detached Sentinel HASP seat reads as consumed for its entire detach window. Closing that gap means moving from Level 1 to Level 2, True Active Usage, which correlates the checkout against real activity on the machine holding it.
Sentinel HASP driver download: where does it come from? #
Nothing needs to be installed on the machines where people run the software. The driver, the Sentinel runtime and the License Manager arrive as one package: the Sentinel LDK Run-time Environment, published by Thales and usually bundled into the vendor’s installer. Open iT reads what that runtime already reports. Collection runs from an Open iT Core Client on the license server itself, not from the workstations.
A HASP key checkout tells you a seat is gone. It does not tell you whether anyone is working in the application, or whether the engineer denied four minutes later could have had that seat instead. Before signing off on the next block of Sentinel HASP seats, find out how many of the current ones are doing work.
