Ever heard of VPN? It was designed to allow secure "in office" type networks over public networks. You should never expose sensitive internal systems such as KMS servers to the wider world.
I know that and you know that. But a lot of sysadmins are lazy bums who don't want to configure it, that and users don't know how to use it 90% of the time. I fully support the idea of VPN btw.
I doubt they will ever restrict kms servers to the so called private address space of RFC1918. Many organizations run public ip's internally, and restrict access at the gateways.
Or simply buy it? Nobody is going to die from 60 euros. 200 euros kills you for sure. But 60 euros it's much more worth it.
Sometimes easy to say so, but there are regions on this planet, where you have to feed your entire family a whole month with these 60 €. Such a luxury is definitly not accessible for everyone in a legal way....
I have legit copies but I do this to prevent wasting my activations. I don't know about you but I tend to change hardware fairly often and I don't like having to call India and explain why I need re-activation to someone who really doesn't have any damn business knowing why.
that's right. Meanwhile, I changed some hardware except the SSDs or other drives and had no issues in terms of re-activation. The threshold of what you can change counts to a certain value and staying in between will not trigger the activation alert
I took a ssd hard drive installed in a desktop pc and put it in a laptop and it remained activated with kms. I have a few legit keys I am hanging on to for the same reason as I often change hardware and with those legit keys I have it would probably trigger an activation reset.
Oh, I tried this many times before with W7 and it only worked with "very" similar machines, most attempts failed due to minor hardware differences. I never heard about a HD taken out of a desktop, put into a laptop and ran without loosing activation, even a slic 2.1 was in both bioses. Even harder to believe is, that you did this with W8
Thinking of the future.................if they do get stuck with KMS as the only activation hack method leaving the Loader useless, my guess is that someone will create a Windows KMS activator similar to the Office 2010 EZ Activator that spoofs a real KMS server so I wouldn't be fearing that Windows 8 will be the "uncrackable" OS Microsoft has dreamed about. At this stage, I only want to activate my test computer but can use the Rearm method to remedy this for now. I'd advise users to not use Windows 8 on their main computer since there will be compatibility issues and other snags. I usually wait at least 3 months past the official retail release date to go to that step and part of my requirements are that a stable activation hack is in place.
I have several legitimate KMS keys however, I was wondering if its even safe to use them. Does MS track them or is the KMS server stand alone and non reporting? Is it possible to use them silently?
You mean KMS host keys (CSVLK)? They have to be activated with MS before they can be used to activate KMS clients, so it's not possible to use them entirely "silently". Once activated, the server can work on its own without the need to contact MS. Also, don't post any CSVLKs you may have on the Internet. They have a limit of only 6 activations (on different machines), and you probably don't want them all used up.
100, I'm not sure if this gentleman talks about genuine KMS keys. I believe, he mixed them with MAKs and so far, the story ends here. But let us surprise
They are in fact genuine as they are apart of our business license but I wanted to play with a KMS on my ESXi VM Environment at home but I was worried that I may damage our KMS at the office.
It won't be damaged because it's already activated, and you still get 10 reactivations per machine from the key, if you ever needed to. Activating a new machine will decrease the remaining number of activations for the key by one. If your organization's KMS is a VM it could be copied and run on another host without affecting the activation count though. If the 6 activations from a host key are used up you can still request the limit to be increased by MS, so even then the key isn't useless. I doubt they'd unblock a key if it leaked publicly though, they'd probably have to issue a new one.