Centara Licensing

This page describes how Centara POS licensing works.

Getting a license for a new POS

Centara's license is hardware based. In order to get a new license, you have to provide the MAC address of the network card of the machine you will run Centara POS on.

One way to do that is to use the GetMac.exe application provided with Windows. This is a console application, so in order to run it, you have to start either a command shell or a powershell.

Press the Windows key + R, enter cmd and press enter

In the console window that comes up, enter getmac and press enter

C:\>getmac

Physical Address    Transport Name
=================== ==========================================================
24-2F-FA-1D-06-7E   \Device\Tcpip_{68018CFF-E247-4536-9597-370744C6A89B}

The output may be more complex than above, for example if more than one network card is present in the machine. Normally the first network card listed is the active network card.

An alternative method is to use the IPConfig /all console application, but the output of that program is out of scope for this manual.

The other step is to get the hostname of the machine. In a console window enter Hostname and press enter

c:\>hostname
S1POS1

License generation

Centara Inc is normally responsible for generating a new license for a new POS. To get a new license, send an email to [e-mail] with the MAC address and details of where the POS will be used.

License application

The license is applied for the POS in Centara Server. There are workstation properties for Software license and Network name. Both have to be filled in.

Once this data has been published from Centera Server, the POS can be installed on the target machine.

License matching on the POS

When Centara is started on the POS, it looks up the license in it's local database (data is synchronized from Centara Server, including this information). The license includes the MAC address that it was generated for and Centara reads that information, and matches it to all active network cards on the POS machine. If any of them matches, Centara will use the license and start, otherwise Centara will not start and display a message to that effect.

This is done locally on the POS machine, and the MAC network address is never sent to Centara server.