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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/
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.
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
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.
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.
This site isn't really a "license server" in the way that it sounds like you mean though. I use this site once in awhile myself as we have volume licenses through Microsoft. You go to the site to download software (then you have a copy and can use it without downloading again). You also go there for your volume keys. These are keys like a KMS (Key Management Server ) key. Once you have that, you can install as many copies as you want. Or, if you choose to use the MAK (Multiple Activation Key) - those are typically good for 5,000 or so activations. They don't activate against THIS site, so until you run out of activations on your key and need another key you don't need this site. Smaller companies get keys with less activations and may have 100, 500, 1000, etc. on their MAK key.
oh, wait, just got slashdotted