Activation TS failing now

[yoda1]

hi guys,

 

I had setup my windows 7 activation using a cmd line task sequence and VL code...it was working fine and now its not.......i checked the VL key has not expired.....

 

anyone run into this ? thanks..

[Rocket Man]

I too use VL activation with run command line. The only time I ever experienced something like this is when the key was expired and the other is when some remote sites in the hierarchy use open DNS as their public DNS for content filtering and had blocked a category in the content filtering system that prevented the clients from communicating with Microsoft activation. Once the content filter was lifted to allow this everything was good again.

[yoda1]

kool rocket man, thanks....can you please walk me through where or how to check the hierachy and the rest ??? the environment i am administering as follows:

 

only 1 primary site.........no cas and no secondary sites.....one server for all the roles including mp, dp and so on.....default task sequence + 5 apps....

 

thanks......

[Rocket Man]

TBH the only way I can tell you to check this quickly is to check too see what public DNS servers are specified in your forwarders in DNS, this should be set to your ISP DNS servers (best practices) or in some cases like I mentioned with sites that this problem occurred for me was customers using Open DNS so the forwarders were set to Open DNS servers, which has a content filtering management portal, and Microsoft activation was blocked due to some category specified in the un-allowed list.