Skip to main content

validating a Gurobi academic license remotely, via ssh (SOCKS)

Answered
Neal Young
  • Edited
Gurobi-versary
First Comment
First Question

How do I validate my Gurobi academic license remotely, that is, from a computer that is not on my university network?

Official instructions for Gurobi 9.1 are here: https://www.gurobi.com/documentation/9.1/quickstart_mac/academic_validation.html, but these require a VPN.

There are old instructions for using an ssh tunnel on the (retired) google group https://groups.google.com/g/gurobi/c/MaEP4cun8o8?pli=1, but these no longer work.

Instead of a VPN, one can apparently use an ssh SOCKS proxy. This worked for me as of January 2021. Specifically, commands for enabling a SOCKS proxy on my mac are:

sudo networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxy 'Ethernet' 127.0.0.1 4088
sudo networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxy 'Wi-Fi' 127.0.0.1 4088

ssh -N -D 4088 <remote host>

Then, in a separate terminal window, run grbgetkey as usual.

grbgetkey <LICENSE KEY>

There are more complicated instructions for doing it via socks proxy without using grbgetkey at https://medium.com/@drfyp/validating-an-academic-gurobi-license-through-a-socks-proxy-on-macos-740f7d9527b4 that also worked for me as of January 2021. For the record, I'll try to paste an abbreviated version of those here:

[first, connect to a the remote computer via ssh SOCKS proxy,
see elsewhere, or the link above, for instructions on that]

In a text editor, write the following link:

http://apps.gurobi.com/keyserver?id=<key>&hostname=<hostname>&hostid=<hostid>&username=<username>&os=mac64&localdate=<date>&version=<version>

Where:

  • <key> is a valid academic key obtained freely from the Gurobi website.
  • <hostname> is the hostname of the computer you’d like to create a license for.
  • <hostid> is the last 4 bytes of your computer’s MAC address in hexadecimal notation (e.g 2b90abcd).
  • <username> is your user name on the computer for which you are requesting a license.
  • <platform> is a string used by Gurobi to identify the OS of your computer (e.g. linux64).
  • <date> is today’s date in YYYY-MM-DD notation.
  • <version> is the version of Gurobi (e.g. 9)

Part of the information can be obtained by using the following command in the terminal of your computer:

grbprobe

You get something like:

info : grbprobe version 9.0.0, build v9.0.0rc2
HOSTNAME=JohnDoe-MacBook-Pro.local
HOSTID=2b90abcd
PLATFORM=mac64
USERNAME=johndoe
CORES=4CPU=Intel(R) Core(TM) i7–4870HQ CPU @ 2.50GHz

The final link should be like:

http://apps.gurobi.com/keyserver?id=61329999–9999–9999–9999-020d093b9999&hostname=JohnDoe-MacBook-Pro.local&hostid=2b90abcd&username=johndoe&os=mac64&localdate=2019-12-13&version=9

Open this link in your browser, you get a text like:

RESULT=0 LICENSEID=389999 # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE except as noted # # License ID 389999 TYPE=ACADEMIC VERSION=9 HOSTNAME=JohnDoe-MacBook-Pro.local HOSTID=2b90abcd USERNAME=johndoe EXPIRATION=2020-12-12 KEY=SK9ABC9V CKEY=SK9ABC9V

Copy this text in a new file with the following format, and save it as gurobi.lic in the home user directory of your computer:

# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE except as noted
#
# License ID 389999
TYPE=ACADEMIC
VERSION=9
HOSTNAME=JohnDoe-MacBook-Pro.local
HOSTID=2b90abcd
USERNAME=johndoe
EXPIRATION=2020-12-12
KEY=SK9ABC9V
CKEY=SK9ABC9V

You should now be able to use Gurobi.

0

Comments

3 comments

Date Votes
  • David Gleich
    First Comment

    I couldn't get these instructions to work. (on Catalina, it seems opening a new terminal window doesn't give the terminal the proxy information... and I was still getting the 'not an academic domain' error) But this led me to an easier fix...

    $ ssh -N -D 4088 user@host.edu

    Then in another terminal

    $ export HTTP_PROXY=socks5://127.0.0.1:4088
    $ grbgetkey --http --verbose <LICENSE KEY>

    You can probably get this to use https too if you setup the https_proxy variable, but I didn't try that.

    1
  • Neal Young
    Gurobi-versary
    First Comment
    First Question

    See also https://or.stackexchange.com/questions/5563/how-to-validate-a-gurobi-academic-license-remotely-via-ssh-socks-proxy .

    0
  • Matthias Miltenberger
    Gurobi Staff Gurobi Staff
    • Edited

    Hi Neal!

    Please open a ticket if you have difficulties with \(\tt{grbgetkey}\) or your license. We are always happy to get people up and running with Gurobi.

    Cheers,
    Matthias

    0

Please sign in to leave a comment.

Didn't find what you were looking for?

New post