[slurm-users] remote license

[Davide DelVento]

I am a bit confused by remote licenses.

https://lists.schedmd.com/pipermail/slurm-users/2020-September/006049.html
(which is only 2 years old) claims that they are just a counter, so
like local licenses. Then why call them remote?

Only a few days after, this
https://lists.schedmd.com/pipermail/slurm-users/2020-September/006081.html
appeared to imply (but not clearly stated) that the remote license are
not simply a counter, but then it's not clear how they are different.

The current documentation (and attempts to run the "add resource"
command) says that one must use the license count, which seems to
imply they are just a simple counter (but then what do they need the
server for)?

So what is what?

In my cursory past experience with this, it seemed that it were
possible to query a license server (at least some of them) to get the
actual number of available licenses and schedule (or let jobs pending)
accordingly. Which would be very helpful for the not-too-uncommon
situation in which the same license server provides licenses for both
the HPC cluster and other non-slurm-controlled resources, such a
user's workstations. Was that impression wrong, or perhaps somebody
scripted it in some way? If the latter, does anybody know if those
scripts are publicly available anywhere?

Thanks