When hqn_lsd starts up, or is reinitialized via hqn_lsa -reinit (see The License Server Admin Tool, for details of this option), it looks for permit files that match the regular expression
.*hqn.permit[0-9]*$
That is, any string, followed by the string hqn.permit, and possibly followed by a number. For example, hqn.permit, hqn.permit1, Lisp-hqn.permit, all match this pattern.
The directories that hqn_lsd searches for permits can be specified by one of the following methods.
The first is to supply the -p option on hqn_lsd's command line. This option takes a colon-separated list of pathnames to search. If you do not use the -p option, or no permit files are found in the directories specified using it, hqn_lsd consults value of the environment variable HQNPERMITPATH, also a colon-separated list of search paths. If the variable has no value, or no permit files are found using it, the following directories are searched in order:
The order in which the permit files are read is determined by their order within the directory (that is the order shown by ls -f).
hqn_lsa -sinfo shows what permit files have been read and in what order. If no permits are found, hqn_lsd remains idle until given further instructions, for instance by using hqn_lsa -reinit to re-initialize it.
For any permit file for which hqn_lsd's host is its entire server domain, hqn_lsd will now serve licenses for the products listed in the permit file. If the products are to be run on other machines, the server host requires an hqnserver1 alias. For multiple-host server domains (see Setting up domains with more than one host), at least n/2 (rounded up) daemons must be started before any licenses will be served, where n is the number of hosts in the server domain.
If any errors are detected in a permit file (such as an incorrect lock string), hqn_lsd discards the rest of the file and issues error messages to the system log and standard error. The cause and position of the error can also be found with hqn_lsa -sinfo.
LispWorks Guide to the License Server - 15 Sep 2017