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KMS problem

ShanmanShanman Member Posts: 223
Ok I hope I am in the right spot for this thread.

I am having a problem at work with a KMS server and was hoping one of you knowledgeable people can help me out.

I have a volume licence of office 2010 that I am trying to get deployed though out our organization. We have a a 2008 AD environment with mostly all XP and a few win7 machines. As for servers we have a mixture of 2008 2003 and some linux.

I have installed KMS on a 2003 server and I have the VAMT installed on the KMS host. Microsoft will not activate anything until the counter reaches 25. So I have installed office 2010 on the machines and they are pointing to the KMS host for activation and I see the events in event viewer but the counter does not seem to be increasing past 4. Any thought as what I should do next?

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    Excellent1Excellent1 Member Posts: 462 ■■■■■■■□□□
    Not sure, but I've seen that happen when the machines were deployed with identical client machine ID's. Might be something to check.

    Edit: Here's a link to an issue similar to one that you are describing. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/officevolact/thread/0246cee9-d931-4fd4-a9e8-fae8a555a9e1/
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    docricedocrice Member Posts: 1,706 ■■■■■■■■■■
    It has been a while since I've dealt with server-side KMS stuff, but when a Windows Vista / 7 Enterprise edition client needs to activate, it sends a DNS SRV request for VLMCS._TCP. Assuming your clients are doing this and gets a response back from DNS pointing to the KMS, the clients then make a connection to the KMS server's TCP port 1688 where some RPC magic happens. You can verify this through a packet sniffer (or TCPView for a high-level look).

    I'm assuming the process is the same for Office 2010 Enterprise edition activations.

    In any case, one trick that I've found (at least with an older version of KMS to activate Vista) is to activate a bunch of VMs running on VirtualBox, then afterwards each time after activating to revert to a snapshot that's set after sysprepping. I've read that the KMS can activate (but doesn't increase the activation count for) virtual machines, but it seems to work with VirtualBox. Once you get the count up to 25, that 25th client will get activated.

    You can manually activate by opening up an elevated CLI and under system32, do a slmgr.vbs -ato. Make sure the machine clocks are properly synced. If you get errors (aside from the "insufficient count" message), then that's something you'll need to look into.
    Hopefully-useful stuff I've written: http://kimiushida.com/bitsandpieces/articles/
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    blargoeblargoe Member Posts: 4,174 ■■■■■■■■■□
    Your client firewall on the PCs may be blocking it
    IT guy since 12/00

    Recent: 11/2019 - RHCSA (RHEL 7); 2/2019 - Updated VCP to 6.5 (just a few days before VMware discontinued the re-cert policy...)
    Working on: RHCE/Ansible
    Future: Probably continued Red Hat Immersion, Possibly VCAP Design, or maybe a completely different path. Depends on job demands...
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    ShanmanShanman Member Posts: 223
    The client firewall is not blocking. The requests are coming through. I can see this via event view on the KMS host. I think the problem is the all my XP boxes have the same CMID. I don't think you can change that with xp. I have a new set of 60 computers coming in with win7 as the OS... Does this mean I have to wait until I get those online before I can start using KMS? We only have a few win7 boxes in the domain.
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