I distribute IDL to users via a read-only network share (an /opt NFS filesystem, mounted read-only; this is Unix).

Users run IDL by adding /opt/idl/idlXX/idl/bin to their path; that binary knows to look in /opt/idl/idlXX/license/ for the link to the (floating) licence server, via o_licenseserverurl.txt. The process of retrieving a licence appears to result in a lock-file (or some other temporary file) being created in /opt/idl/idlXX/license/flexera-sv. If /opt is mounted read-only, however, then this fails.

I've worked round this by creating a symlink from that name to /var/opt/idl/flexera-sv, and then being sure to create that directory (writable, mode 1777) on each client. That works, but is an extra bit of client configuration/setup I'd rather avoid. I could also create it as a symlink to, say, /tmp, which of course exists on the clients without further configuration, but I'm not sure if that would fail in some circumstances.

Is there a best practice here, or any problems I haven't thought of, with my solution so far?

Best wishes

Norman