this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
8 points (72.2% liked)

Selfhosted

39948 readers
328 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm planning to replace the existing SSD within my Dell Optiplex pc. When I bought it, it came with an SSD that had a windows installation with pro license activated. Now, when I replace this with a new SSD, how do I transfer the license?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] RegalPotoo@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

So some fun facts:

  • If you buy enough licenses from Microsoft, instead of giving you a bunch of unique licence keys to keep track of, they will give you a license that you can install on a server, and a special "volume license key" that you use on every machine - then, instead of talking to Microsoft to activate themselves, they connect to your server which ensures that it is only activating as many machines as you have licenses for
  • These volume license keys are public knowledge to the point that Microsoft publish them on their site because they are useless unless you have a server to validate the activations
  • The server protocol is not complex, has been reverse engineered, and there are open source server implementations that forget the whole "ensure you have the right number of licenses" part