Monthly Archives: May 2011

Windows 2008 Disabling Auto Activation Afer 3 Days?

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http://blogs.technet.com/b/johnbaker/archive/2009/08/29/extending-your-evaluation-activation-grace-period-on-windows-server-2008-and-2008-r2.aspx

Most of the content I use for webcasts and live events have virtual machines that have been created either by someone on my team or by someone at Microsoft corporate. The virtual machines are not created with trial versions of the operating system but with fully licensed product. For obvious reasons they are not activated, so when I first boot up I usually get a message saying the machine has to be activated within a few days. Sometimes though, the machines have past the activation grace period and will not log on unless they are activated NOW!! This can be somewhat annoying because most of the time I only need the machines for a demonstration the following week, maybe for the next month or so, and I don’t want to use one of my product keys for such a short term machine life. So what can I do?

The first thing I do with machines that are requiring immediate activation is simply turn them off. I then change my host machine date back to a date closer to when the virtual machines were originally created and boot them up one more time. Now the virtual machine thinks my date is kosher and is within the activation grace period, and lets me logon. That’s great but the date is wrong and I need to access the internet with the host as well as do my demos, and having a wrong date causes issues. Never fear, one of the things we can do with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (actually this works with Windows Vista and Windows 7 as well), is re-arm the machine and extend the activation grace period another 60 days.

So How’s This Done?

Simple… all we need to do is run a script in the windows\system32 folder called slmgr.vbs. Check the steps below:

Bring up a Command Prompt.
Type slmgr.vbs –rearm, and press ENTER.
Restart the computer.

You computer has now extended the evaluation period 60 days!!! You can re-arm up to 3 times giving you an activation-free trial period of a total of 240 days!!
How Much Time Is Remaining in the Evaluation Period

You can find out by running the same script this time with different switch:

Type slmgr.vbs -dli, and the current status of the evaluation period is displayed. (the dli switch means – display license information)

If you want to find out what else you can do with the script type slmgr.vbs –? and you’ll get a full list and explanation of all the switches.

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1524370&page=8

I did install it without entering a product key. I actually found the solution to my problem. When you run a default install of Windows 2008, it defaults to a KMS-based installation and what it will attempt to auto activate off of is a Key Management Server, not the Microsoft key management servers. I actually didn’t install using a MAK key like I thought as it didn’t actually ever ask me for a serial key. Anyway, to disable the auto activation key after Windows is installed, you just need to change the following registry key:

Disable automatic activation
Automatic Activation can be disabled using this registry setting.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\SL\Activation
Create or modify a DWORD value named Manual and set the value data to 1

AD Timeout

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http://www.petri.co.il/forums/showthread.php?t=7242

Try to get your hands on one of the clients that is experiencing the problem and run on it klist.exe or kerbtray.exe (both are part of W2K/W2K3 Resource Kit) to verify that the client is not experiencing problems with renewing it’s Kerberos ticket (both TGT and session tickets)

Try to get your hands on one of the clients that is experiencing the problem and run on it klist.exe or kerbtray.exe (both are part of W2K/W2K3 Resource Kit) to verify that the client is not experiencing problems with renewing it’s Kerberos ticket (both TGT and session tickets)

AD Groups explained

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http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/Litmus/universal_groups.htm

Domain Local Groups (These used to be plain Local groups).

Think of domain local groups as great hosts, literally anyone can be a member, users, Global groups, Universal groups, even computers can join a domain local group. Local groups are bad travellers and only operate in their own domain.

Best practice is to use local groups to assign permissions to resources like databases and printers.
Global Groups

These are great travellers, they can wander the entire Forest. The key point is that global groups are poor hosts and can only contain members from their own domain.

Best practice is to make global group your default group, and for starters, make a group to represent each of your departments.
Universal Groups

Another question for you, why is it sometimes the radio button against create Universal group is greyed out? The answer is when the Domain is in mixed mode you cannot create universal groups (NT 4.0 BDC’s would not understand them). You need to ‘raise domain level to Windows 2000 native before you benefit from universal groups. Think of universal groups as the ultimate container for nesting groups. They are good hosts and great travellers.

Best practice is make it rule to only include global groups inside Universal groups, no individual groups.
Global Catalog Implications

As you would expect, domain local and global groups are listed in the global catalog, however the individual members are not listed. So changes in global group membership have zero impact on global catalog replication traffic.

Universal groups on the other hand, not only are listed in the global catalog but also the individual users or nested groups are also listed. Now you can see that adding users to a universal group will generate replication traffic. That is why Guy says only put global groups inside universal groups, the individual members inside the global groups are not replicated.

In Windows 2000 the situation is that one change of membership to a universal group causes the whole list to be replicated, thankfully that changed in Server 2003, now only incremental changes are replicated not the whole list.

ESXi Thin/Flat Drive Types

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Taking a VM from VMWare Workstation 7 use the vmware Converter (Downloaded from their site for free). For me, I wanted my VMs to have an expanding disk, this is how all my Workstation VMs are setup. So their limit might be 100GB, but I know I prop won’t use that and don’t want to waste the space. I want them to expand up to the 100GB when needed.

When you convert the VMs to import them into ESXi though, by default it imports the VMs with the drives set to Flat. So if you set provision to 100GB, it will make the drive 100GB on the ESXi. I found out after I’d converted, annoying. So pick Thin as seen in screenshot below and it will create an expanding disk as well. Flat gives better performance but this is just a test lab so doesn’t matter about that.

Convertor

Exchange 2010 Prerequisites

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http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb691354.aspx

This example is for a server that will have the typical installation of the Client Access, Hub Transport, and Mailbox server roles:

You can add the below in the Add-Windows Feature wizard or just paste the code below in a PowerShell window and it does just the same.

Add-WindowsFeature NET-Framework,RSAT-ADDS,Web-Server,Web-Basic-Auth,Web-Windows-Auth,Web-Metabase,Web-Net-Ext,Web-Lgcy-Mgmt-Console,WAS-Process-Model,RSAT-Web-Server,Web-ISAPI-Ext,Web-Digest-Auth,Web-Dyn-Compression,NET-HTTP-Activation,RPC-Over-HTTP-Proxy -Restart