Packet question

   Hi folks. I have a bit of a problem that I've been looking at for a
couple of weeks now. A work we have some proprietary software that relies
on floating licenses to operate. We have 5 licenses and can install the
software on as many machines as we like but only 5 at any given time can
actually run the software. Unfortunately, there is lots of research going
on now and usually there are more than 5 people wanting to use the
software at any given time. Some people even come in early in the morning
and start it up and leave it running in order to ensure that it is
available to them during the day.

   The license server software is supposed to have a timeout function but
the software vendor tells me that this will not work with their software.
So, my plan B was to put the server on one side of a bridge computer and
have the bridge continually monitor traffic to and from the server.
Hopefully, it would be possible to figure out what was being passed to the
server in the data packets and then put some kind of monitoring program in
to fake a 'hangup' packet after x minutes. I've figured out what most of
the stuff in the data packets is but now I have to do the 'hangup' part.
Is there anything out there that might be used/altered for this purpose?
Basically, I need to monitor the network and start a timer when a license
is checked out and then after an hour or so send the server a hangup
packet. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Keith Brown
Department of Chemistry/
Saskatchewan Structural Sciences Center
University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
306-966-1725
http://chem4823.usask.ca/kbrown.html

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There are only 10 kinds of people, those who understand binary and those
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Received on Mon Jun 4 12:32:49 2007