I recently had to install an old piece of software on our (headless) Ubuntu 20.04 Linux system. Our first hurdle was binaries not executing properly — on attempting to run executables, the error No such file or directory would appear. This was corrected by installing lsb-core:

$ sudo apt install lsb-core

The software we wanted to use had copy protection, specifically Macrovision’s FLEXlm license manager (now with Flexera Software). Our FLEXlm-protected software was provided with a node-locked license and this was tied to a specific MAC address on our machine. It’s possible to ask FLEXlm what’s the HostID (MAC address(es)) that it sees by running:

$ lmutil lmhostid
lmutil - Copyright (c) 1989-2006 Macrovision Europe Ltd. and/or Macrovision Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
The FLEXlm host ID of this machine is ""

Unfortunately, the software was unable to “see” our Ethernet adapter due to older versions of the software looking for Ethernet adapters starting with eth. The reason? systemd uses an alternative naming convention, formally part of the predictable network interface names, that essentially means Ethernet devices will start with en instead of the “traditional” eth prefix. We therefore needed a way of getting FLEXlm to see the Ethernet adapter.

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