Adobe FlexNet copy protection crashes: polluted system log

Adobe software continues to irk me...not only does Adobe not make improvements in basic functionality like open and save speed, they charge for upgrades that have the same old bugs and you get some irritating new bugs for your “upgrade” price—

Launch any CS4 application: Adobe’s FLEXNet software (FNPLicensingServ) crashes constantly (SIGSEGV means a bad memory access eg "unix OS signal indicating segmentation violation"), filling up my system log files with garbage (I’m not the only one experiencing this, search onilne):

Friday, November 28, 2008 2:39:36  US/Pacific 
Nov 28 14:39:43 llcMP /Library/Application Support/FLEXnet Publisher/Service/11.5.0/
FNPLicensingService[8449]: Started - This service performs licensing function
 on behalf ofFLEXnet enabled products.
Nov 28 14:39:44 llcMP kernel[0]: unknown SIGSEGV code 0
Nov 28 14:40:14: --- last message repeated 58 times ---
Nov 28 14:40:24 llcMP kernel[0]: unknown SIGSEGV code 0
Nov 28 14:40:54: --- last message repeated 3 times ---
Nov 28 14:41:04 llcMP kernel[0]: unknown SIGSEGV code 0
Nov 28 14:41:34: --- last message repeated 3 times ---
Nov 28 14:41:44 llcMP kernel[0]: unknown SIGSEGV code 0
Nov 28 14:42:14: --- last message repeated 3 times ---
Nov 28 14:42:24 llcMP kernel[0]: unknown SIGSEGV code 0
Nov 28 14:42:54: --- last message repeated 3 times ---
Nov 28 14:43:04 llcMP kernel[0]: unknown SIGSEGV code 0
Nov 28 14:43:34: --- last message repeated 3 times ---
Nov 28 14:43:44 llcMP kernel[0]: unknown SIGSEGV code 0
Nov 28 14:44:00: --- last message repeated 41 times ---

 

The poetic justice here is that the copy protection scheme is unlikely to work with the program enforcing it failing constantly! This is wonderful if you want to steal Adobe software. (I don’t and don’t advise anyone to do so). But the irony provides some small compensation for legal users. Presumably this is one bug Adobe will consider a priority to fix!

A workaround to seeing your system log files fill up is to use Activity Monitor to forcibly Quit the FNPLicensingService process, as shown below. Please do this only for legitimate reasons: to keep your log files from growing constantly with SIGSEGV messages.

The way to keep your system log from filling up with Adobe crashes: kill FNPLicensingServ

If you want to automate this, you can run a daemon script to do to. See this hint.