Author Topic: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix  (Read 24107 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline legacyTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • !
  • Posts: 4415
  • Country: ch
obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« on: August 30, 2015, 12:14:04 pm »


So I bought an original Pro/E media for Unix.
"for Unix" means { UPUX/PA, AIX/PowerPC, Irix/MIPS } are supported, but I do not have a valid license
And it seems I can't buy a license (too obsolete software, out of any support)  :palm:

I'd like to run on Irix-6.5/MIPS-R12K, any idea, guys ?

purpose: to have a good nostalgic play with Unix, to have a good piece of software under my finger tips to redesign my hobby
 

Offline Tainer

  • Contributor
  • Posts: 37
  • Country: 00
Re: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« Reply #1 on: August 30, 2015, 05:07:42 pm »
And it seems I can't buy a license (too obsolete software, out of any support)  :palm:

I'd like to run on Irix-6.5/MIPS-R12K, any idea, guys ?
Well, you know.. there are such things like *cough* torrents *cough*
 

Offline legacyTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • !
  • Posts: 4415
  • Country: ch
Re: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« Reply #2 on: August 30, 2015, 05:27:45 pm »
never found a valid license there, I have seen something for R20, which is completely different (and incompatible) with the R17 I have  :palm: :palm: :palm:
I have also tried to contact the company who made Pro/E, without a response  :-//
 

Offline Bassman59

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 2501
  • Country: us
  • Yes, I do this for a living
Re: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« Reply #3 on: August 30, 2015, 08:12:39 pm »
never found a valid license there, I have seen something for R20, which is completely different (and incompatible) with the R17 I have  :palm: :palm: :palm:
I have also tried to contact the company who made Pro/E, without a response  :-//

Well, that's not a surprise, because for software there's no such thing as re-selling. How much did you pay for the discs, and why did you expect that all you needed to run the software was just the binary and not a license?
 

Offline legacyTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • !
  • Posts: 4415
  • Country: ch
Re: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« Reply #4 on: August 30, 2015, 08:25:16 pm »
When I bought the Pro/E CD I was thinking the license was already included inside and not hardware locked.

I was thinking that because when I bought the WordPerfect media (2 CDs), the license was included as "demo"
and this means you can run the program, it's fully working, the only limitation is the label "running as demo"

Pro/E will not run at all without a license  :palm: :palm: :palm:
 

Offline legacyTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • !
  • Posts: 4415
  • Country: ch
Re: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« Reply #5 on: August 30, 2015, 08:29:49 pm »


an other example is Adobe Illustrator.
When I bought the CD I got a license written on a piece of paper.
It's a demo license, it's not hardware locked, and the program is fully working.
The only limitation is: I can't print, but I do not need to print anything!
 

Offline legacyTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • !
  • Posts: 4415
  • Country: ch
Re: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« Reply #6 on: August 30, 2015, 08:36:02 pm »
I wonder if there is a "demo" version or license for Pro/E

There were collections of demo CDs called "hot mix", they were made for Irix with the purpose to let people to try applications
I see there is a demo version of WorkPerfect (5 versions earlier than mine), but I can't see Pro/E in any of these CDs  :-//
 

Offline HighVoltage

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 5453
  • Country: de
Re: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« Reply #7 on: August 30, 2015, 09:26:41 pm »
I see there is a demo version of WorkPerfect (5 versions earlier than mine), but I can't see Pro/E in any of these CDs  :-//
WordPerfect was outdated 20 years ago
First time I see it mentioned in long long time.

If you look at the right places, I have no doubt that you will find both packages.
There are 3 kinds of people in this world, those who can count and those who can not.
 

Online Rasz

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 2616
  • Country: 00
    • My random blog.
Re: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« Reply #8 on: August 31, 2015, 12:02:31 am »
1: wrong forum section

2:

Well, that's not a surprise, because for software there's no such thing as re-selling. How much did you pay for the discs, and why did you expect that all you needed to run the software was just the binary and not a license?

Bassman59 Country: ASS of the Earth aka US

well, all I can say is LOL bro http://www.zdnet.com/article/oracle-cannot-block-the-resale-of-its-software-in-europe/
Next thing you will claim patents on round corners and swiping are totally legit

3:

So I bought an original Pro/E media for Unix.

media, not a license. Where did you buy it? its so obsolete getting a license with the media shouldnt be a problem, usually people selling old junk dont even know there is a key/paperwork needed
does it need a code? or a hardware dongle?

I'd like to run on Irix-6.5/MIPS-R12K, any idea, guys ?

Do you actually have SGI box to run it on? have you tried installing? what was the problem?

4: PTC Creo is on a lot of torrent sites, not to mention you can get a legit academic edition
« Last Edit: August 31, 2015, 12:05:51 am by Rasz »
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
My fireplace is on fire, but in all the wrong places.
 

Offline legacyTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • !
  • Posts: 4415
  • Country: ch
Re: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« Reply #9 on: August 31, 2015, 01:53:32 am »
does it need a code?

Pro/E needs a valid Flex code, and this code is "node locked", it means it depends on the MAC_address and something else (e.g. the S/N of the motherboard).

Quote
Do you actually have SGI box to run it on? have you tried installing? what was the problem?

The CD does not contains an executable, it contains a (shell) script which identifies the platform in order to untarball the right file. There is a big .tar file for each supported platform. The scrip does nothing more than invoking "tar", so at the end you get Pro/E installed into a folder.

You have just to fix the "path", then you can launch the application (all this procedure is written in the ReadMe.txt, inside the CD), but once launched from the Irix console, the Application ends immediately reporting the message "Flex error, no license found".

the Readme.txt tells to add the right license (physically it's a long pairs of alphanumeric chars) to the Flex Manager.

There is no "demo mode", so without that license you can't do anything, and the program simply ends as soon as it is launched.

Quote
PTC Creo is on a lot of torrent sites, not to mention you can get a legit academic edition

I will try to contact PTC, in order to ask them if they have a "demo" version, I do not think they have an "academic edition" for Irix 6.5, but I will ask.
 

Offline Bassman59

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 2501
  • Country: us
  • Yes, I do this for a living
Re: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« Reply #10 on: August 31, 2015, 01:57:05 am »
Well, that's not a surprise, because for software there's no such thing as re-selling. How much did you pay for the discs, and why did you expect that all you needed to run the software was just the binary and not a license?

Bassman59 Country: ASS of the Earth aka US

well, all I can say is LOL bro http://www.zdnet.com/article/oracle-cannot-block-the-resale-of-its-software-in-europe/
Next thing you will claim patents on round corners and swiping are totally legit
No, what I am saying is that it's perfectly OK for you to sell your physical media. Whether the vendor will provide a license key to the purchaser is up to that vendor. And in pretty much all cases, the answer to that is "no, we will not provide a key."
 

Offline legacyTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • !
  • Posts: 4415
  • Country: ch
Re: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« Reply #11 on: August 31, 2015, 02:00:41 am »
I forgot: bought on ebay dot ca
 

Offline legacyTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • !
  • Posts: 4415
  • Country: ch
Re: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« Reply #12 on: August 31, 2015, 02:03:15 am »
@Bassman59
I believe I have bought the Pro/E media from a "recycler".
 

Offline asgard20032

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 184
Re: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« Reply #13 on: August 31, 2015, 03:56:14 am »
Old program = easy to reverse engineer it and crack it. A nice learning exercise, lucky you. You bought a reverse engineering training kit. I wish i could find old software to make some fun in assembly.
 

Offline sync

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 799
  • Country: de
Re: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« Reply #14 on: August 31, 2015, 10:05:03 am »
Pro/E needs a valid Flex code, and this code is "node locked", it means it depends on the MAC_address and something else (e.g. the S/N of the motherboard).
On IRIX it depends on the host id.

Quote
There is no "demo mode", so without that license you can't do anything, and the program simply ends as soon as it is launched.
I don't know Pro/E but I have experience with other CAD/CAE software in this class. There are no demo modes. If you what to evaluate a software you contact the manufacture/vendor and get a evaluation license which is usually node locked and have an expire date.
 

Offline legacyTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • !
  • Posts: 4415
  • Country: ch
Re: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« Reply #15 on: August 31, 2015, 10:16:51 am »
yes, but oh well, first you have to understand Irix binaries, especially the call points to FlexLm. It's not so easy. I guess  :-//

some time ago, I bought a pair of floppies with a compiler demo, the limitation was no more than 100 lines of C, no more than 2000 lines of asm, and no more than 3000 chars per file. I paid just the floppy + shipping, something like 10 bucks, and it helped me a lot because its documentation told me about the memory layout of a second hand board which I bought without any manual, but luckily included in the list of the supported boards by the Demo compiler.

Excellent examples, full documentation of my board (txt files + C files + assembly files + linker script, in short everything I needed), the compiler was amazing, googling around to understand how much money was the full version (and if it was still available) I found a russian dude who claimed to have removed the limitations X____X

I contacted him, and he argued that he was able to assembly the dos binary (.exe) in order to find - he said - "hot points" (1), so he exchanged them with "NOP".

I was impressed, but then I switched to GNU C/68k, I have no experience in reversing&C, just a feeling in my head: a DOS program should be easier than an Irix's one, a piece of cake against a nightmare. I guess.


(1) he explained
where in the program, the code flow calls a function is_running_into_demo_mode which check if the program has to run as demo or full features, he followed the call, and inside the function he replaced everything except the return value, so calling that function was modified to always answer "no" to the question is_running_into_demo_mode? no->full features enabled without any limitation

Code: [Select]
function is_running_into_demo_mode:
... NOP /* original check removed */
... NOP
... NOP
... return No


main program:
....
....
call is_running_into_demo_mode
if answer is Yes then
... limitations, demo mode
else
... no limitations, full features
 

Offline legacyTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • !
  • Posts: 4415
  • Country: ch
Re: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« Reply #16 on: August 31, 2015, 10:19:55 am »
Pro/E needs a valid Flex code, and this code is "node locked", it means it depends on the MAC_address and something else (e.g. the S/N of the motherboard).
On IRIX it depends on the host id.

sure, but the host id depends on NVRAM & MAC_address. The NVRAM (sometimes it's a EEPROM, it depends on the machine) has the S/N of the motherboard, plus the MAC_address.
 

Offline HighVoltage

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 5453
  • Country: de
Re: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« Reply #17 on: August 31, 2015, 10:21:32 am »
Old program = easy to reverse engineer it and crack it. A nice learning exercise, lucky you. You bought a reverse engineering training kit. I wish i could find old software to make some fun in assembly.
So true....
I am not a programmer by any means but this was so easy in those days. Just bypassing where the code was looking for the dongle and instead just make a jump to the position in the code, where the program would go after successfully finding and identifying the dongle.
 
We did this not for the fact to get a software for free, but just to get rid of 5 to 10 dongles on the parallel port of the PC and for fun.
There are 3 kinds of people in this world, those who can count and those who can not.
 

Offline legacyTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • !
  • Posts: 4415
  • Country: ch
Re: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« Reply #18 on: August 31, 2015, 10:29:08 am »
I don't know Pro/E but I have experience with other CAD/CAE software in this class. There are no demo modes. If you what to evaluate a software you contact the manufacture/vendor and get a evaluation license which is usually node locked and have an expire date.

this explains why I got a demo-license for Illustrator and WordPerfect, and I was lucky, they are not node-locked, and they have no expire date.

oh well, I found a Mathematica demo, it's node-locked (I can run it only on the machine of my friend, I can't move the program to mine), but it has no expire date. He found the demo already installed when he bought his machine.

When I contacted Wolfram they said
1) sorry, we do not support Unix since a while
2) we provide a free accademic version for RPI/Linux (arm)
 

Offline sync

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 799
  • Country: de
Re: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« Reply #19 on: August 31, 2015, 11:16:29 am »
this explains why I got a demo-license for Illustrator and WordPerfect, and I was lucky, they are not node-locked, and they have no expire date.
That's cheap software. Keep in mind that these CAD/CAM software costs ($)$$$$ per license per year. And every feature costs extra $$$$.

Quote
1) sorry, we do not support Unix since a while
Expect the same from PTC. Unix workstations are dead since a long time and especially IRIX died earlier.
 

Offline amyk

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 8240
Re: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« Reply #20 on: August 31, 2015, 03:34:52 pm »
FlexLM - it was really common in the 90s, there is plenty of information/tutorials around on how to break it.

You don't even need to know the instruction set in detail, as Mike's video here shows:

 

Offline jnz

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 593
Re: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« Reply #21 on: August 31, 2015, 05:54:33 pm »
Heh, someone would be much happier with Windows and Solidworks.

ProE isn't something you want to get into right now, and an old version, in Unix... Yea, I'd say course correct!
 

Offline codeboy2k

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1836
  • Country: ca
Re: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« Reply #22 on: September 01, 2015, 09:18:35 pm »
FlexLM - it was really common in the 90s ...

I hated FlexLM so much back in those days, it was infecting everything I used, HP, Sun, IBM workstations.. every product wanted it's own license manager running and they didn't interoperate.. then when you changed workstations or upgraded we needed to get new licenses again grrr...

It's still around, too.  MATLAB uses FlexLM licenses, probably others too.  Autodesk bought them and uses it for all their products, and calls it adLM.  I don't use any Autodesk products, but googling around it seems they are major f*cktards with DRM too, actually doing something nasty and permanent on the harddisk in a hidden area or partition just for licensing.. so that uninstall or backup/restore doesn't work...
 

Offline legacyTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • !
  • Posts: 4415
  • Country: ch
Re: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« Reply #23 on: September 01, 2015, 10:11:27 pm »
MATLAB uses FlexLM licenses

never seen on Irix, it seems it was not good

probably others too


  • MIPSPro C/C++
  • SoftWindows
  • Adobe { Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere }
  • WordPerfect
  • Alias WaveFront { SurfaceStudio, StudioPaint }
  • Mathematica
  • Pro/E

This is what I know, but I am more interested in umm, { Ansys (+Fluent?), Catia, Pro/E, FiberSIM, AutoDYNþ, ... }
« Last Edit: June 14, 2016, 02:44:29 pm by legacy »
 

Offline legacyTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • !
  • Posts: 4415
  • Country: ch
Re: obsolete Pro/ENGINEER, aka Pro/E, Unix
« Reply #24 on: January 19, 2016, 11:22:17 am »
so, suddenly my machine died  :'( :'( :'( :'(
the problem is located in the motherboard and it seems too hard to be repaired
I got a new machine, then I bought a new hard drive and I copied my App on it.

with SGI, your "hostid" comes from the mac address of the first built-in lan located on the motherboard
If your motherboard dies, you loose the hostid.

  • machineA (died): comes with SS&&S already installed, plus a valid license key,  it does not expire
  • machineB (new): able to reprogram the 96CS265 EEprom, so I can change the hostid, and so I did

I copied my application and its license into the new hard drive
and it happens the following:

Code: [Select]
machineB: flexlm-diag -c /var/flexlm/aw.dat
flexlm-diag: This is the correct node for this node-locked license
flexlm-diag: but I don't know if the license-key is good or not

And I am confused: missLicense? C'mon, we're quitters and we're sober
but you don't know, if to trust in evil or in god, ready to fall, taught to be nothing at all


I tried to contact the Company which developed my Application (in order to get a new license for my new machine)
and d they are like dinosaurs: gone, extinct since a jurassic while

ideas  :-// :-// :-// ?
 


Share me

Digg  Facebook  SlashDot  Delicious  Technorati  Twitter  Google  Yahoo
Smf