Alpaca Licensing

Alpaca is licensed in one of three ways: Perpetual, Term, or Subscription. A license is required for Alpaca to operate. Your Alpaca license includes all the various modules that have been purchased by your company as well as Host ID mappings to your BroadWorks Application Servers. The Alpaca license is typically located in /etc/alpaca/server and usually named ecg.license or ecg.license.txt. See the Configuration Guide for details on how to change this default location.

Perpetual

A Perpetual license is a permanent license without an expiration date. The only time this license needs to be updated is if there is a change to your purchased modules or if you are adding/modify valid host ids.

Term

A Term license is a temporary license with an expiration date. Usually these licenses are valid for 90 days or less and are typically used for trials. Once a term license expires, Alpaca will no longer operate until another license is applied.

Subscription

A Subscription license is a temporary license that expires after 30 days. Unlike a Term license, a Subscription license will be automatically updated by Alpaca as long as the customer has an active contract. This is accomplished by Alpaca reaching out to the ECG License Manager periodically to check the status of the license. If the license is about to expire, a new one will be generated and will replace the old one.

Alpaca authenticates to the License Manager using a generated API token and the IP address of the Alpaca server. The API token can be generated at the ECG Portal under the "Your License API Keys" section. You will need to provide the IP address of the Alpaca server that will be using the token. If the token is used anywhere except from the configured IP, the request will be denied.

See the Configuration Guide for further configuration.