Terminal Server CALs

[Norphy]

I'm a little confused here. We have a terminal server with 10 per machine CALs attached to it. We had an issue where a client couldn't connect to the server due to a licensing issue. I took a look at the Terminal Server licencing to see if there was an issue there and sure enough, there was.

My own personal home machine has a CAL attached to it. "Fair enough" you say, "you've connected to it from home and now you have a CAL. Serves you right for not paying attention, idiot". However, thats the thing. I know for a fact that I have never connected to that terminal server from home. I have connected to another server over RDP but that server is in remote administration mode, not application mode. So therein lies my question: Is the Terminal Services licensing service daft enough to count administration mode servers in its remit?

[wesleyw]

Probably if you told the TS Server thats in remote admin mode that a licensing server exists I wouldn't put it past MS to make it check even if you hadn't. If you haven't got a licensing server then of course this wouldn't apply and again you wouldn't have a time out on the remote admin just the app server version. Strange that it does but it's probably a MS "quirk".


Wes

[Geoff]

You could always slap a port filter on the network adapter so it can't talk to the licensing server. It runs on TCP port 1099 by default.

Also remember licenses do 'expire' if they've not been used for awhile. I think it's 90 days by default (I'm unsure if you can change it so they expire quicker).