A Technical Journey » Active Directory

Extend Windows 7 & Windows 2008 Grace Period.

Paul McSharry — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:49:40 +0000

On Installation Windows 7 requires licence activation. By default the grace period to do this is 30 days.

If for legitimate reasons this needs to be extended, it is possible to reset this a maximum of 3 times. Resulting in a total 120 days grace period.

This option is activated by running a command prompt session in administrator mode and entering the following;

slmgr.vbs -rearm

A message box will be displayed and the machine will need to be restarted.

This is a Microsoft supported option, and does not violate the EULA
This also applies to windows vista.

Paul McSharry — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:16:06 +0000

On many occasions it is useful to know the date a windows machine was created/installed.

This useful oneliner solves the issue

From the CMD prompt run

systeminfo | find /i “install date”

Example output

Original Install Date: 28/11/2009, 11:17:44

Paul McSharry — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:32:15 +0000

Depending on the network infrastructure, communication between domain controllers may pass through various routers or firewalls.

The following ports are required for Active Directory Services.

Port	Protocol	Function
53	UDP/TCP	DNS
445	UCP/TCP	File Replication Service
88	UDP	Kerberos authentication
135	UDP/TCP	DC to Client and DC to DC communication
139	TCP	DC File Replication Service
138	UDP	DC File Replication Service
389	UDP	LDAP
464	UDP/TCP	Kerberos Password Change
3268	TCP	Global Catalog
3269	TCP	Global Catalog