The AWS Cloud has now become a familiar pat of our cloud existence but some of you may have come across a few problems that are not immediately obvious from start of use. One particularly funny (as in ‘strange’, not ‘haha’) problem you can find in Amazon is the Genuine Advantage Program from Microsoft. This tells you that your instance’s licence is not valid.
First impressions on seeing this are usually, “Wasn't this supposed to be managed by Amazon?” and obviously “Why are they asking me to activate my Windows license?” The fact is that Amazon actually does take care of this problem.
Namely:
- On first start up Amazon Ec2WindowsActivate service registers the copy of Windows and sets the activation server link.
- Later the instance can reconfirm its license by connecting these servers.
At the time of writing these are:
us-east-1:
us-west-1:
eu-west-1:
ap-southeast-1:
All now seems pretty logical - but then... “Why am I getting the black wallpaper, and why doesnt Windowsre-activate?” The key point is that DNS names can only be resolved by the internal Amazon DNS. So if you change your Windows DNS servers to some others (your Active Directory ones for example) your server won't be able to resolve it.
So far there are two solutions;
- You can restore Amazon DNS in the machine configuration, or
- You run manually (or scripted) 'slmgr.vbs /skms IP ' and 'slmgr.vbs /ato' commands in CLI after resolving the DNS request against the Amazon DNS and getting the actual internal IP you instance should point to.
Hope that helps you all Cloud users.
Emilio Garcia
Senior Engineer
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