Clock Setback - Licensing Issue

Clock Setback, Licensing Issue, Error 5040, Error-40, Windows

Christian Kramer avatar
Written by Christian Kramer
Updated over a week ago

ARES Products uses a licensing manager called Reprise Licensing Manager (RLM) by Reprise Software.

RLM detects windback/clock setback (Error 5040 or -40) by looking for future-dated files in system directories, and examining the accessed and modified timestamps on all the files there. In many cases just running the system for a little while with the correct date will access the future-dated files and the problem will clear itself. Often a reboot helps too.

Remove all *.lic file from our ARES Commander Licensing folder

(Note: With the CAD kernel 2023 (build 22.1) the license files are moved to the current user %APPDATA% folder.

e.g. C:\Users\[currrent user]\AppData\Roaming\ARES Commander Edition x64\Licenses\)

Please check the system date and time on your computer and ensure that it is correct for your current location.

Start up ARES Commander

It the 2 above steps doesn't help to sort out the issue, you will have to go into those directories and look for the offending files, and set them to the current time by accessing them. Below are the directions for how to do this on a Windows- PC.

Resolve Date/Time Function Issues

Under Windows:

On Windows, this error message is related to file timestamps on your system that are not current. RLM may be detecting clock-windback and not honoring expiring licenses.

Find Files:

You can find the offending file(s) in a Command Window with these commands:

Correction:

If your output shows a future date, perform the following commands to modify the timestamps appropriately for the license manager to work. You can run these commands in a Command Prompt (or place the contents in a .bat file and run it from the command prompt).

You will need to update these sample commands with the actual file name of each future-dated file. Ensure that you use the correct command for the future-dated files as some files are future-dated based on ‘last write time’ and some are ‘last access time’.

powershell $(Get-Item C:\Windows\SampleDirectoryName).lastwritetime=$(Get-Date)

OR

powershell $(Get-Item C:\Windows\SampleFileName.dll).lastaccesstime=$(Get-Date)

OR

powershell $(Get-Item C:\Windows\SampleFileName.exe).lastaccesstime=$(Get-Date)

Examples:

Below are some examples of the commands run for future-dated files:

powershell $(Get-Item C:\Windows\XYZ).lastaccesstime=$(Get-Date)

powershell $(Get-Item C:\Windows\XYZ).lastwritetime=$(Get-Date)

powershell $(Get-Item C:\Windows\Xyz.dll).lastaccesstime=$(Get-Date)

powershell $(Get-Item C:\Windows\Abc.exe).lastaccesstime=$(Get-Date)

powershell $(Get-Item C:\Windows\Abc.exe).lastaccesstime=$(Get-Date)

powershell $(Get-Item C:\Windows\Instruction.txt).lastaccesstime=$(Get-Date)

Verification:

After executing the above, re-run these commands to ensure the timestamps are updated correctly:

dir /od /ta C:\Windows

dir /od /tw C:\Windows

If the output does not show any files with a timestamp greater than today’s date, please try to start ARES Commander.

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