KMS - Activating Windows on Isolated Networks / Standalone Computers

[SoultakerPT]

In some particular cases you may not have the possibility to active Windows through the normal KMS process, because you have some machines that for example:

- Aren’t joined to a domain

- Don’t have DNS configured

But of couse, you still need to activate Windows on this machines. On more “complicated” way is using something, that I’ve not tested, called VAMT that make it possivel to run a tool on the isolated machine and than send the generated information through another machine. This is obviously causes more effort for the activation and on unattended deployment scenarios (LTI or ZTI) it’s not very convencional.

This week someone from the middleware team, finally installed KMS Server on the network and finally I could test this scenario because we have some kiosk type machine that need this kind of solution.

Windows Vista clients uses DNS queries to find where KMS Server is located, and in my scenario I couldn’t have DNS configured on the machine, so the challenge was, some how, to force the client to know where the server was.

So…after some search and a very very nice help from a Microsoft fellow (Nino Torres) we found a way to do this.

There’s a tool called slmgr located on ‘C:\Windows\System32′ that can be used to force Windows to know where the KMS Server is giving it the ipaddress and listening port.

On unattended scenarios you should use the vbscript (also located on ‘C:\Windows\System32) called slmgr.vbs.

To force the KMS Server information, you should run the following commands:

- cscript C:\Windows\System32\slmgr.vbs -skms kms_server_ip_address:portnumber

- cscript C:\Windows\System32\slmgr.vbs -ato

Example:

cscript C:\Windows\System32\slmgr.vbs -skms 10.0.0.1:1688

cscript C:\Windows\System32\slmgr.vbs -ato

The first line, sets in registry the information about the KMS Server IP Addres and the port his listening to.

The second line, forces the Windows Activation.

[CAUTIONS]

:: In most cases, isolated networks have firewall, so we need to open the way for KMS Server.

:: The default port for KMS Server is 1688

:: Don’t use slmgr for unattended installions because it shows message boxes, use slmgr.vbs instead

For more information about Volume Activation visit this Microsoft Website:

Volume Activation 2.0 Technical Guidance

[anyweb]

thanks for that, and here's a step by step guide to setting up a KMS server for anyone thats interested

http://www.windows-noob.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=649

cheers

anyweb