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Microsoft eOpen Site Down For Nearly a Week
mauriceh writes "Since Monday Dec. 7, the Microsoft eOpen license website has been mostly 'Down for Maintenance.' When we do not see this message, we still do not see most of the normal functionality. As this is Microsoft's main channel for managing and installing licenses for products such as Server, and for open license products for business, this makes the company effectively 'closed for business!' Attempts to connect to https://eopen.microsoft.com/ are redirected (after a bad certificate warning) to https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/servicecenter/sitemaintenance.html. For those who wish to activate Microsoft Business Solutions software need to obtain Software Registration keys, and these also can not be obtained, as the site http://www.microsoft.com/BusinessSolutions/MBSRegistration does not resolve; instead one gets a Microsoft Search page. Telephone calls to their support numbers for the licensing program yield either busy signals, or a message saying one should 'call back later.'"
and they are trying to upgrade it to XP instead...
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Don't worry, they will be back a couple of weeks after new year!
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
Do I even need to rant, or does the story make it clear why proprietary software is a problem?
Palm trees and 8
The rest of the internet is like a sweatshop-slavery conditions! No time off not even on Chrismiss! But Microsoft allows the interent to take a vacations with its family and frineds in this holiday season, which promotes social justice and peace.
UNITE with the Campaign for a Free Internet because today, our future begins with tomorrow!
Hardware distribution is an entirely different and far more complicated matter, you need sufficient manufacturing capacity, combined with sufficient supply of the source components... Any of these failing will cause significant delays, a single tiny part being in short supply can scupper your entire production run.
Software on the other hand, once you have one copy distributing more is trivial.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I guess they were too busy trying to fix this problem?
[insert a whole bunch of DRM schadenfreude here]
Greetings and Salutations.
This is the last of a number of massive infrastructure failures in the past few months. The issues with Gmail, T-Mobile, SwissDisk, etc and this should be a warning that the computing infrastructure is becoming baroquely fragile. Fragility and unreliability in the basic tools necessary to keep a business running are hard to deal with in good economic times. With the current, VERY stressed situation, it could easily cause marginal businesses to go toes up, throwing many more people out of work, and having a ripple effect that pushes hundreds of other support businesses closer to the edge.
I would suggest that, instead of the creeping featuritis that has been so popular with software for the past decade that the focus should change towards making the foundations more secure, and, less likely to fail. Among other things, this WOULD require stopping this insane focus on having software "phone home" all the time, and, fail if it is unable to contact the appropriate servers. Another big step would be to focus back on quality of software rather than flashy features. There really should be no reason today for a piece of software to be exploited by a simple buffer overflow. The principles of excellent programming have been known and studied for 50 or more years now, and, should be fairly well understood. You MIGHT have heard of this fellow by the name of Knuth...he has said a thoughtful thing or two on the subject, and, it might well be worth reading some of his writings.
More later
Dave Mundt
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/
Just a private monopoly in progress.
In Microsoft's fantasy world, everyone is dependent on them. Everyone uses Microsoft operating systems, applications, and development tools. There is simply no competition.
Hence the busy signals.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
As a Microsoft reseller, we received notification on Tuesday Dec 8th that eOpen is supposed to be gone and replaced with:
www.microsoft.com/licensing/servicecenter/
Of course this new link doesn't work either, but at least we know that the eOpen portal itself not working is intentional.
In this case, yes. But a 100% open service whose functionality required a given (open) server to work wouldn't be affected
I think you are mixing things up a little.
One, the original point was that proprietary systems without license servers would not be effected for installation. Since OS X has no licenses for example, you could install new versions all day long.
The second part of that sentence seems to be referring to the document DRM server... even in that case, a propritary solution where you hosted your own server (which you could restore) would work as well.
The problem seems to me to be the old "do you trust the cloud", i.e. having crucial functions handled by servers beyond your control.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It isn't like they are a technology company or something.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
An open ecosystem is not the same as open source software. There are open source applications that depend on sole-source servers or services, and proprietary applications that work with open servers and use open protocols. While what you say is true, it's not really relevant to this incident.
This is about open systems, not open source... and while the two are related (and definitely good things) they're not the same thing and even, at times, have worked at cross-purposes.
It is now safe to turn off your computer.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
As much as I like to bash Mic..well, any organisation that deserves it really...I had no problems accessing the site or downloading ISOs of Win7 and Win7 upgrade Weds last week.
AT&ROFLMAO
eOpen was closed on december 6th and replaced by VLSC (Volume Licensing Service Center) at the following link: https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/servicecenter/home.aspx
Morte info can be found at: http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/existing-customers/manage-my-agreements.aspx
The VLSC site also appears to be down now, but maybe the swap is taking longer then planned or they are working out a bug on the week old site.
Not saying Microsoft doesn't screw up, but lets get all the facts, eOpen is closed for good and has been replaced.
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
Microsoft are trying to rationalise how their licensing works. Historically, they've had a myriad of different websites you had to use depending on if you have an Open Subscription License, an Open Value License, an MSDN license or a license that you made up yourself with a box of magic markers and a sheet of paper.
They're certainly trying to merge Subscription and Open Value right now - I recently purchased a few licenses on the OVS plan (the website for which is being shut down) and I'm having trouble accessing them on the "new" system.
This isn't another "gosh how fragile everything is" story. This is a bog standard "some f*ckwit decided to go live with the new system without testing it properly" story. The only eyebrow-raising part is that you would expect Microsoft to have a whole brace of plan Bs in place at the drop of a hat for just such an occurrence.
They've been planning to replace eOpen for months. If you had viewed the warning message in red text at the top of the eOpen page since November 1st, you would know this.
Also, the volume licensing site is usually down on weekends for "maintenance" even though it seems like it's to deter piracy in the form of IT licensing admins logging in from home and downloading software. I don't think I've ever been able to connect to it from a Time Warner home cable connection.
And while we are at it, where is your open tag?
The new one not working is a separate issue.
This is madness. You can't say "Oh well they were always going to shut down on this date" without an implied "the new server will be active". It's not separate in any way, the old server going down and the new server coming up were linked events, the new server being a precondition for the old to vanish.
Unless you were saying it makes any kind of sense to adhere to deadlines and damn the customers?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As one of their ideal customers, we used to make a lot of use of eOpen. We registered all our licences on there, and it was nice, a single portal to track all of our Microsoft licences and upgrade rights.
Then we left it without logging on for a while (after all, it was all working fine), and the next time we tried to use it we discovered Microsoft had wiped *ALL* of our licence information that we had painstakingly entered into their site.
Turns out that they linked the accounts to Live, and that your account expires if you don't use it for 90 days.
Handy that for corporate account licence management, and strangely enough we haven't used it since.
The only eyebrow-raising part is that you would expect Microsoft to have a whole brace of plan Bs in place at the drop of a hat for just such an occurrence.
I thought we all learned from Danger that in fact Microsoft had no such plans.
So this current issue is just Microsoft planning as they have shown us they are wont to plan.
You would be wise to make future plans based on Microsoft accordingly.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This Blog Post Has the number to ring if you need it....
and people just noticed today?
Wow Microsofts open source really is grabbing attention!
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Outages, mistakes, no Certificate, late bad code full of bugs, Bribing legislators and Standards Organizations, Continuing Anti-Trust violations are all in the days work for the crooks from Redmond.
Even for themselves!
oh, wait, just got slashdotted
I bet there is a server experiencing downtime every hour somewhere in the world causing customers pain. Lets post individual stories about it ! We can get to the next +100,000 milestone in no time.. :)
Hi. You have no clue. I am an IT manager for a mid-sized company. Microsoft FORCES me through their eOpen site for my licensing. Want to do site licensing? you use eOpen. And the site sucks. Features don't work. The navigation is a nightmare. And now, it is down. So, yes, it is a big deal.
Microsoft isn't the only company with this kind of problems. AT&T has a similar system for business contracts. We were negotiating to get a point to point T1 set up. And for a week their damn contract system was down. No one could (or would) circumvent the system. So as a consumer you are stuck. What is the commonality? In both cases it is a big company that you are practically forced to work with. So they can do whatever the hell they want and you are stuck.
So, no AC, this is not a Microsoft bash thing. it is really a big business bash thing.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I agree... I've been trying to send my 360 in for RROD repairs for the better part of a month, and the site is always down in some way. Right now, I can't even pull up the main page because of an "internal server error".
How convenient... my 3 year warranty expires in mid January.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
They were keeping the data on their sidekick!
We have a few licenses that used to be managed through eOpen, I never received any notification about its disappearance, but happened to discover the switch to Volume License Service Center on Friday when trying to login to eOpen. VLSC was definitely up and running at that point, I could log in and manage the same licenses that I used to with eOpen.
That said, the initial terms of agreement screen that appeared after logging into to VLSC was terribly confusing. A blank window with no instructions, I was expected to figure out that I needed to manually select my region and language from a non-obvious drop-down menu, then click a button labeled "Go", causing the terms of agreement to appear in English on the screen. There is a box below in which you are meant to type your name and click "I agree", however this button was not clickable until figuring out how to make the agreement appear above, and there were no instructions to indicate this. I spent several minutes feeling very foolish as I typed in my name, couldn't click the button to proceed, clicked "Cancel" instead, got to the VLSC dashboard to find that all the functions were disabled because I hadn't accepted the agreement, logged out and back in to make the terms window appear again, repeat a few times. Grrr.
I found the solution and it works for me!!!
The obvious solution is that you aren't reloading the page enough times. Try it, it works the 16th time!!
I thought OS X server came with an activation key requirement.
I think they removed the serial number from Snow Leopard. Regardless, the older versions simply used a serial number that did not require activation. My beef is with relying on the server you do not control, simple license keys validate via an algorithm which means if you have a key and the install disk it will work forever, without internet access or remote servers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No, but it makes it damn clear why copy protection is a problem.
We are right back where we started. Here is a good blog to follow the progress. //richfrombechtle.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/microsoft-volume-licensing-service-centre-vlsc/ Microsoft is a bunch of clowns.