What if Microsoft's activation centers have a power failure?

Friday the Nuremberg power failure has also affected the main servers of (Open) SuSE so badly that automatic updates didn’t work unless a mirror has been chosen. This is a pretty bad situation, but if there is a (power) failure at the Activation Servers of Microsoft, the situation is much worse: at least online activation isn’t possible and an activation by phone is a tedious chore! If that is also blocked due to the failure, then the problem is really serious: if the grace period for activation has expired, Windows and or Office might be from seriously crippled to absolutely useless, despite that customers have paid for their licenses.

I only want to say that the Nuremberg power failure is an inconvenience, which can be circumvented by using mirrors. It’s also possible to be patient and wait until the problem has been fixed.

**What if Microsoft’s activation centers have a power failure?

If only! - What a Microflop that would be!

**Fortunately Suse requires no activation. What happened last weekwas no problem for me really and I was in the midst of a fresh install. Installing Suse was easy with the DVD. All up and running in 20mins. Vista which I was restoring to my laptop’s earlier wiped disc, took OVER 4 hrs!!

Just a little patience and opensuse.org was back online.

My greatest dissapointment was the forums being offline too. Though I did find a strange back door, so actually never really lost it.

The forums weren’t offline, but some portions of the forums were displayed from the affected server, but that was offline. Therefore your backdoor worked, but the lay-out didn’t look very well, because of the missing bits of the affected static server.

  • Tom2k,

frankly I don’t care a bit about Microsoft’s disaster recovery plans.
Apart from that, how high is the risk you need to activate an MS product while their server is down? 1:1.000.000.000?

BTW, I had to do a phone activation once and it worked flawlessly and quickly.

Uwe

Is there a contingency plan for the openSUSE servers in case this happens again, or is there anything a user can do to avoid such issues?

Maybe allow the user to select a list of a few servers (or auto-fill a number of them) so if one fails the system defaults to the next?

Just an idea.

This is a very good idea! Mirrors are a perfect means to cope with (power) failures like the one at 10th of October. But the mirror-list shouldn’t be only available at the affected servers, but everywhere…

Everyone will realize how much of a rip off microsoft is and run to opensuse cause its free? And better than Windows?

I highly doubt that. If anything, they’ll switch to Macintosh because they can buy that in a store and it comes with a free tech support guy.