A Windows System Admin's Blog

Covering Server Administration, Endpoint Management, Scripting and Network Management

AWS and Windows Activation

,

Quick one today where I was on a client server hosted in AWS that wasn’t activated.

Trying to activate it via Settings App throws and error. Like most large scale cloud vendors (except Azure), AWS use KMS to activate their windows machines, however sometimes the servers need some help to reach the internal KMS servers at Amazon – especially so when using your own DNS servers.

Open an administrative PowerShell console and enter the following commands

Import-Module "C:\\ProgramData\\Amazon\\EC2-Windows\\Launch\\Module\\Ec2Launch.psd1"
Add-Routes
Set-ActivationSettings

Then perform an activate online command as per a normal KMS activation (or you can wait…)

slmgr /ato

And that should get it activated and the watermark removed.

Leave a Reply

More Posts

How to easily Check your SPN and Delegation settings for SQL Server in an Active Directory environment

I was recently setting up some Linked SQL Servers for a customer to perform queries against a database on one server through another. One of the things you need to get right when setting up linked servers when using Service accounts in Active Directory is SPNs (or Service Principal Names) and Authority to Delegate (for […]

Getting Started with Maester and Entra Security Hardening

So I’ve known about PingCastle and Purple Knight for a little while now and have used them for on-premises audits and Azure AD audits a while back.  I recently stumbled on Maester which is a testing framework that can be used to automate testing for your Entra environment.  I finally had some time to give […]

Fixing Error 1935. An error occurred during the installation of assembly errors.

Sometimes when installing software, I get an error during the installation of either the .Net framework or the Visual C Runtimes. This error, Error 1934. An error occurred during the instllation of assembly … will prevent the installation from being successfull, furthurmore after many hours of searching, many of the fixes listed around the web […]