Activation Error Server 2008

Error Message

I got an activation error on Windows Server 2008.  The details are as follows:

Log Name: Application
Source: Software Licensing Service
Event ID: 8198
Level: Error Description: License Activation (SLUI.exe) failed with the following error code: 0x80004005

It should be noted that I was never asked for a product key during install.

Research

I found a Microsoft document that recommend phone activation. I called and the Microsoft activation staff referred me to the technical helpdesk. This would have cost. I decided to continue my research and found that if you change your product key you can active Windows.

Hypothesis

Changing the product key would allow me to activate Windows.

Procedures

To change your Vista product key (source):

1. Click on the Start Button and type Command Prompt in the search field.
2. From the list that appears, right click the Command Prompt shortcut and select Run As Administrator.
3. At the administrator command prompt, type in "slmgr.vbs -ipk [insert your product key here]"
4. To activate windows after changing the key, run "slmgr.vbs -ato"

To run the Windows Activation Wizard use these comands:

slui or slui 0x01 Display Windows Activation status
slui 0x02 Prompt for Windows Activation wizard via Internet
slui 0x03 Run Change Product Key wizard
slui 0x04 Launch Windows Activation wizard via Telephone.
slui 0x05 Prompt Windows Activation and show activation way except Internet.
slui 0x06 Launch Windows Activation wizard
slui 0x07 Prompt Windows Activation as Windows running on last day to activate.
slui 0x09 Launch Windows Activation wizard after license expiration.
slui 0x016 Display activation status with license expiration warning
"Your Windows will expire in 234 days and Windows will stop working"
slui 0x018 "Your Windows will expire in 5626 hours and Windows will stop working"

Source: Tom's Tricks.

Results

These steps allowed me to activate my copy of Windows 2008 server. I am not sure why I got the error. I think the error is related to the software being from the Microsoft Developers Network Academic Alliance.

Network Drives Showing Disconnected

 

My network drives where showing up as "Disconnected Network Drive", but the drive were working. I was running Windows 2008 Server with an XP client. I was mapping the drive using a startup script in Domain group policy object.

I found a discussion thread on Tech Republic that helped me fix the problem. Click here.

I moved the login script to a user container and the drives connected just fine.

You need to run the gpudate /force command get the change to start correctly.

The problem with this fix is that I will have more than one login script.

Error Connecting to PeopleSoft

My college uses PeopleSoft for managing student records. I was unable to connect to the server from home. I had time out error.

My first hypothesis was that my firewall was blocking access. I was able to open the correct port (I am not mentioning it here for Security reasons) and I was able to connect.

I have had issues with open ports in the past so this an easy fix. The learning from this is to always consider port issues with Internet applications.

Philosophy of Teaching

As a teacher in a technical field, I have to provide students a foundation of technical skills, communication skills, troubleshooting, and problem solving skills that will allow them to be successful immediately in their first job. I have found service learning to be a solid foundation for my philosophy of teaching.

My first exposure to service learning at my college was in spring 2000 when all faculty and students participated in a campus wide day of service. My students and I went to the library for blind and sorted and shelved books on tape. This activity, I was told, was service learning but I soon found out that it was not.

At a faculty development workshop on service learning in the summer of 2000, I attended a lecture about service learning. I found out that just providing service, as we had done at the Library for the blind, was not service learning. The service provided needed to be tied to the learning objectives of course otherwise it was just community service. An idea from a student supplied a way to create real service learning for my technical classes in the fall of 2000.

One of my students was working for Albertson headquarters in Salt Lake City, he had an idea that we could take the surplus computers from Albertsons and donate them to needy families. The donations filled up two 23-foot rental trucks. I was not able to find storage space on campus so the majority of the surplus was sold; these funds were used to start the project and the project has had a strong history of providing service and learning. Since 2000 over 100 computers have been placed with the needy families and in 2007 computers were placed in a medical clinic in Africa. Although I view service learning as very important, I believe strongly in the value of soft-skills training for IT professionals.

Without needed soft-skills, IT professionals can have poor people skills and can be labeled as "IT trolls". My philosophy for addressing this issue can be summed as in every class something is written, and something is presented. This practice, writing and presenting, reinforces English and Communications courses, and just as important they practice real IT related writing assignments. The assignments that they write are training documents, analysis reports, memos, and technical information documents. Many of the documents are part of a troubleshooting lessons that I present.

Troubleshooting is a very difficult to skill to teach but I feel that I found a method that improves my students' ability significantly, and it starts from the first day of class until they graduate. My students are responsible for the health of specific computer throughout the term and are required to keep it operational. When their computer breaks I walk them through the process of researching the issue, identifying possible solutions, trying one solution at a time, and documenting the solution. After a few weeks my students understand, that I will respond to questions for help with the phrase "Have you Googled it?" They know that they need to work through the steps before I will help them. This is an important skill but not the final component of my approach to teaching.

Being formulistic in teaching is dangerous, I feel a need to be flexible and adapt in order be an effective teacher. In the past, I have required students not to surf the internet while I lecture. I have adjusted that recently due to a 1 minute assessment I did that showed a trend. Over 50% my students were struggling with the technical jargon and would like access to websites to decode all the jargon.

Finally, with flexibility, a method for teaching troubleshooting, a focus on communications, and active learning through services learning, I feel that I am an effective teacher.

Company without a Country

In the internet age, it is possible for a company to operate without a country, but they could find themselves longing for a country like the protagonist Philip Nolan in Hale's "The Man Without a Country" (Hale, 1863).

Nolan, a fictitious conspirator with Benedict Arnold, is sentenced to spend the rest of his life at sea and to never hear of the United States again. This suits him at first but later he longs for his country.

The technology exists today for a company to literally be without a country. Business scholar Kobrin (2001) put it this way:

"Virtual firms can race to the jurisdictional bottom at the speed of light; moving the business to a locale with a less onerous regulatory structure may entail no more than a few keystrokes" (p. 691).

This has happened. Online gambling companies have made the small inland country Antigua a hotbed of internet gambling(Can online betting change its luck?). These virtual companies, though, run the risk of being caught in a Cuba of the 1960s or a Grenada of the 1980s; revolutions could make them long for the stability of the United States like Nolan.

But is this virtual flight an ethical use of technology as a strategy? I would argue no because of the ethics of Utilitarianism. The cost in jobs, tax base, and stability out weights the profit for a single company (Velazquez, 2007).

Researchers estimate that the internet could have a "meltdown" by 2010 without significant ($43 billion to $52 billion) investment in backbone technology (Thomson,2007). Moving away from a tax structure that would help fund these improvements is unethical.

The possibility of political unrest, the unethical avoidance of tax responsibilities make a virtual company strategy too risky. It is better to be a company with a country than without.

 

References

Can online betting change its luck? Retrieved 11/27/2007, 2007, from http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_51/b3913097.htm

Hale, E. E. (1863). The man without a country Project Gutenberg

Kobrin, S. J. (2001). Territoriality and the Governance of Cyberspace. Journal of International Business Studies, 32 (4), 687-704.

Thomson, I. Internet facing 'meltdown' by 2010 - computeract!ve. Retrieved 11/27/2007, 2007, from http://www.computeractive.co.uk/vnunet/news/2203809/internet-face-meltdown-2010

Velasquez, M.G. (2006). Business Ethics: Concepts and Cases. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

Different Drummer

"I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.

It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. (Thoreau, 1854)

 

Modern management is based around the planning, the controlling, the organizing, and the leading function (Daft, 2007), but innovation and having a first-move strategy often goes against those functions.; management has to make a conscious effort to nurture innovation for those who hear Thoreau's different drum.

 

Intel created the first CPU, 4004 processor; this chip was created in violation of the planning, controlling, organizing function of management. The engineers at Intel were told to design a multiple chips set but they designed a set with few chips and one was a CPU(Gardiner, ). This violation of the planning function would be Intel's core business for next 35 years as they moved away from making memory chips and focused on CPUs.

 

I worked at Intel in the 1990s and they fostered innovation through creating a strong culture of innovation. Culture has many components: heroes, and stories are two of them (Daft, 2007). The Intel Hero of 4004 PCU effort was Ted Hoff. Company literature focused on his part in the 4004, even though others were involved. He was given an Intel Fellow position, which translates into a job for life. This Hero story enforced Intel support for going against planning, controlling, organizing when you had a better idea.

 

Another method a manager to use in creating a strong culture is stories. I worked at the Intel plant in New Mexico, and that plant had epic about innovation. A plumber, who supported the ultra-clean water supply for computer chip manufacturing, devised a plan to recycle factory water. The plan would save Intel over $100,000 and he received 10% of those savings. This story was repeated ever year when the cost saving contest was launched. This story shows Intel's commitment to innovation through a generous payout.

 

Organizations need to innovate but we also need control. The solution, I think, is be very selective about what part of the business we control and what part we allow innovation on. When I was at Intel, we always knew chips were "production" and which were "engineering experiments." We stuck to the standard process on production chips and we never experimented. If someone heard a different drum beat, they knew they could work with engineering and try to prove that beat.

 

References

Daft, R. (2007). Management (8th ed.). Boston: Thomson Southwestern.

Gardiner, B. Intel 4004 microprocessor turns 35 - news and analysis by PC magazine. Retrieved 11/19/2007, 2007, from http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2059163,00.asp

Thoreau, D. H. (1854). Walden. Retrieved January 28, 2007, from http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext95/waldn10.txt

Fiero vs Miata Product Life Cycle

The product life cycle is can be a valuable tool for strategist and if managed it can provide more sales and higher profits. The product life cycle of the Pontiac Fiero (1984-1989) compared to Mazda Miata (1989-2006) illustrates the value of managing the product life cycle as a strategic tool.

The stages of product life cycle are Market development (pre-launch), Market growth, Market Maturity, and finally market decline. The key for the strategist-scientist is to predict the length of each stage (Levitt, 1965).

The unit sales of the Fiero and Miata illustrate the growth, maturity, and decline of the cycle (See Figure 1). The Fiero was much more meteoric and catastrophic while the Miata held in maturity phase for a 3x over the Fiero. The Miata matched the sales of the Fiero in seven years sold and doubled the over sales of the Fiero.

The Miata versus Fiero figures show the typical short-term vision of American carmakers in the 1980s. It was well know inside Pontiac that the Fiero had safety fire issues before release (Ingrassia & White, 1994). Pontiac executives should have been able to predict a short product life cycle for a fire-prone vehicle because of the high profile safety related demise of the Chevrolet Corvair in the 1960s.

What seemed to be missing from the Pontiac executives and strategist was a since of the environment. They misinterpreted the value Americans placed on quality and they decided to fight the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration efforts for a recall (Ingrassia & White, 1994).

Finally, Pontiac executives knew the activities they needed to do to make money (new and exciting models) but they lack a focus on sustainability (Porter, 1996). If they had considered the long-term management of the life cycle, they might have fixed the fire problems in the Fiero and results would have been better. One Pontiac executive was quoted as saying, "The Fiero could have been a Miata" (Ingrassia & White, 1994).

Figure 1.

References

Ingrassia P. & White, J. (1994) Fiero Firing Squad. Autoweek September 26, 1994. Retrieved November 2, 2007, from

Levitt, T. (1965) EXPLOIT the Product Life Cycle. Harvard Business Review; Nov/Dec65, Vol. 43 Issue 6, p81-94, 14p

Porter, E. (1996, Nov. - Dec.). What is Strategy? Harvard Buiness Review , 61-78.