KMS Activation Woes

[Gatt]

Help!!

I have a number of laptops running Windows 7 Ent and Office 2010 that wont activate against our KMS Server

 

When we try to activate Windows we get the error 0xC004F074 with description "The Key Management Server (KMS) is unavailable"

we can ping the KMS Server from the laptop, I have tried

slmgr /skms 

and

 slmgr /skms 

to no avail.

 

Office 2010 is also showing as unactivated

 

The only difference is that the laptops are NOT part of our domain..

 

The laptops are successfully querying DNS and I can do an NSLookup and get the KMS Server SRV record from the DC..

 

Firewall is also off

 

Before I resort to the MAK Keys, does anyone know of any reason why a workgroup machine would be unable to activate via KMS?

 

Google no use as it just tells me to do the above steps

[SYNACK]

Have you looked at the KMS event log on the KMS server (it has its own catagory) this may have some additional answers. It should still activate them even if they are not domain joined (have seen my unjoined base images activate automaticlly).

 

When you refer to the firewall I'm assuming you mean the server firewall and that you have enabled the KMS Server rule for both domain and public networks.

 

Do you have other machines that have activated sucessfully via the KMS and are there any devices inbetween the laptops and the rest of the network that may be sidetracking the high port numbers that KMS uses like a router/switch configured with access lists.

[Gatt]

Have you looked at the KMS event log on the KMS server (it has its own catagory) this may have some additional answers. It should still activate them even if they are not domain joined (have seen my unjoined base images activate automaticlly).

No errors in the logs..

When you refer to the firewall I'm assuming you mean the server firewall and that you have enabled the KMS Server rule for both domain and public networks.

Firewall is off on the server and client

Do you have other machines that have activated sucessfully via the KMS and are there any devices inbetween the laptops and the rest of the network that may be sidetracking the high port numbers that KMS uses like a router/switch configured with access lists.

All our Domain machines are activated, and as soon as I joined one of the laptops to the domain, it activated...

[tonyd]

KMS is a VL technology so is normally activated on domain joined machines. In order to use it on workgroup machines you need to point them in the right direction - see For KMS clients to be activated, do you have to join them to the domain or they can be activated if they are on the same subnet as KMS host, as workgroup clients? for details

[Gatt]

done all that... it doesnt help matters..