If you're trying to activate an Enterprise copy of Windows Vista you may receive an error stating:

Vista Activation Error - 0x8007232B, DNS name does not exist.

Vista Enterprise uses a centralized server to manage activation, mainly because so many pirated copies of XP used corporate keys that didn't require activation. Theoretically having no corporate keys floating around means there will be fewer pirated copies of Vista¹.

Vista searches for a SRV record in DNS that will tell it the address of your KMS server, so the first thing to do is make sure your DNS suffixes are correct. If you are at mydomain.com, check DNS for the SRV record.

On Windows :

nslookup -type=srv _vlmcs._tcp.mydomain.com

You should get a response similar to:

_vlmcs._tcp.mydomain.com  SRV service location:
priority       = 0
weight         = 0
port           = 1688
svr hostname   = kms.mydomain.com

On Linux:

dig srv _vlmcs._tcp.mydomain.com

Response:

;; ANSWER SECTION:
_vlmcs._tcp.mydomain.com. 3600    IN      SRV     0 0 1688 kms.mydomain.com.

Once you've found your KMS server, check to see if it's listening on TCP port 1688 (use telnet, nmap, etc).

And finally, try re-entering your product key. Right click on Computer, choose Properties. Click the Change product key link and re-enter the product key you used to install Windows. This is actually what worked for me, so I've helpfully put it at the end of the post after you've read the other steps I tried.

1. Not entirely true since people have hacked the KMS activation process [back]

 

Posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 4:43 pm | Filed under Technology
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