Windows Server 2008 User Account Control Gotcha #2

By | January 28, 2009

Yesterday I blogged about some of the confusion that Windows Server 2008 User Account Control can cause.  Continuing on the same theme, here is another example – this time using slmgr.vbs to query the licence activation status of a Windows Server 2008 machine.

This is what you see when you run the command line from a command window that was opened without elevated privileges.

cscript %windir%\system32\slmgr.vbs -dli

Name: Windows Server(R), ServerStandard edition
Description: Windows Operating System – Windows Server(R), VOLUME_KMSCLIENT channel
Partial Product Key: BFGM2
License Status: Licensed
Volume activation expiration: 250200 minute(s) (173 day(s))

Key Management Service client information
    Client Machine ID (CMID): 3af05e3c-b291-47ad-bbf9-cc6278b3c923
    DNS auto-discovery: KMS name not available
    KMS machine extended PID: 55032-00152-339-003838-03-5129-6001.0000-0062009
    Activation interval: 120 minutes
    Renewal interval: 10080 minutes

As you can see, the name of the Key Management Server (KMS) is unavailable, which is not very helpful if you are trying to troubleshoot a KMS issue. 

But now look what happens when you run the same command as Administrator (i.e. with elevated privleges).

Name: Windows Server(R), ServerStandard edition
Description: Windows Operating System – Windows Server(R), VOLUME_KMSCLIENT channel
Partial Product Key: BFGM2
License Status: Licensed
Volume activation expiration: 250200 minute(s) (173 day(s))

Key Management Service client information
    Client Machine ID (CMID): 3af07e3c-b291-47ad-bbf9-cc6278b3c923
    KMS machine name from DNS: kms1.contoso.com:1688
    KMS machine extended PID: 55032-00152-339-003838-03-5129-6001.0000-0062009
    Activation interval: 120 minutes
    Renewal interval: 10080 minutes

In this case the name of the KMS server is shown correctly.

I think it would be more helpful if, in the first example above, the whole command were to fail with an error indicating that elevated privileges are required to successfully complete the command.  The fact that the command partially completes only causes confusion.

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