Am I Legal??

[mikem3522]

This is a long story so please bear with me. About 2 years ago my company purchased 2 HP servers from our former hardware company. The servers were originally loaded with OEM versions of Windows 2003 SBS. In addition the servers were hosted at the hardware company's colocation. After a short period of time it was determined that the SBS operating system was not suitable for our primary application. The hardware company reloaded our servers with Windows 2003 R2 Standard operating system. Over the last couple of years we determined that the hardware company was not living up to thier contractual agreements with regards to maintaining our servers. We made the decision to terminate the contract with the hardware company and move our servers in house. When we picked up our servers, the hardware company did not give us our operating system software, SQL software, or our Symantec Backup Exec software. Over the last month, I have examined our servers and determined that both systems were reloaded using the same operating system CD Keys. Also neither of my servers have COA stickers. I suspect the servers were reloaded from a Microsoft Action Pack (MAP)but, I cannot verify this. Does anyone know how I can verify where the operating system software came from? If I am not leagal, then I will have to take steps to get into compliance. Any help is appreciated. Mike

 

[58sniper]

They could have been loaded with volume or open licensing versions. Not uncommon for there to be no COA. It also means that it could have been loaded from a single media disk. No harm in that.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[Sympology]

Who owns the W2003 software. Did you pay for it, or the hardware company? If you paid for it and paid a full retail price for it, it's yours, volume license or not. However, if there was a some deal where you paid for them to instakl their product, then it's a bit murkier.

Robert Wilensky:
We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.