[windows software] KMS has taken over!

[Trapper]

This is a weird one and I'd like confirmation.

 

I set our KMS up ages ago, but never got above a dozen or so Windows 7 clients at any one time until this summer.

 

Sadly my techie decided to ignore my instructions to not manually activate Windows 7 and Office 2013 and allow our KMS to take over.

 

Now it would appear even though all 50 odd machines had a VLK manually installed and activated online with Microsoft the clients also took a look at the KMS DNS record, deactivated the VLK and activated the KMS. I now have almost 70 Windows 7 clients activated via KMS and as soon as a new Windows 7 installs connects to the network it activates.

 

That actually troubles me as it does not need to be a member of the domain, just sitting on the same network and querying the KMS DNS record is enough to activate it.

 

So my question is this? Has the KMS en-mass removed the VLK Windows 7 key, de-activated them, and then activated them with the KMS key?

 

As I wasn't expecting the KMS to be up and running how often do the clients need to report back to the server to stay activated? I know it works via VPN. I've literally just created a Windows 7 VM at home, not on the domain, but as soon as the VPN connected it activated.

 

Weird man.

[sted]

no a pc activated with a mak key / oem key should never look for the kms server but you can write scripts to set a pc to look at kms and activate that way and i have on occasion set these up as a pc startup script for when say ive turned off the old kms server and want them to find the new one so id check for startup scripts

 

how often do they need to see the kms server every 180 days iirc (so about twice a year).

 

Its all supposed to be automatic and happen without anyone doing anything thats the point. If you really want to limit what gets activated i think you can just get the server to stop publishing the dns record, delete the existing dns record and then use a script something like

 

slmgr.vbs /skms myserver

slmgr/vbs.ato

 

on a new pc that way it will find the kms server and activate but random pcs wont be able to automatically