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Showing posts with label microsoft windows. Show all posts
Showing posts with label microsoft windows. Show all posts

Thursday, 30 June 2011

Microsoft Office I Want A Divorce, Google Apps Is My New Love

Dear ‘Paperclip’,

Firstly, yes, it appears that I am writing a letter, and secondly no, I don’t need any assistance. But thanks for asking. Again.

This is going to be difficult, we’ve been together so long. We’ve created so much. Achieved great things but I’ve met someone else. Someone refreshingly easy to get on with. Someone I find it easier to share with. Someone that allows me to look back at all those changes I’ve gone through without me having to open up every one that didn’t work out. Everything’s so clear and I know exactly where I am. No more raking over old ground looking for an answer. And you change so much, year on year and when we go over things in the past, try and work on things, the newer you just won’t accept it.

We can do all the things that we used to do but easier and from anywhere. I’m not tied to one place anymore. I’m free to share things with other people. And most importantly I no longer have a massive drain on my finances.

My new love is so free, allows me to travel - enjoying being where I am anywhere. You’ve got so much baggage in the cupboard I keep having to come back to check it’s all working.

You’ve made some effort to try and catch up with where I’m going, what I need but it’s just not good enough.

So I’ve moved on. You know how suspicious I am of change but this change has been so easy, we already work so well together.

On this occasion it’s definitely not me - it’s you.

Keep trying ‘Paperclip’, but as for you and me, it’s over.

xx

Friday, 11 February 2011

Keep Calm and Carry On - Microsoft Windows License Activation in AWS

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
Pontus is ready and waiting to answer your questions