I’ll make this really short, but for some reason the windows 2008 instances in the amazon cloud showed that windows wasn’t genuine “Windows not genuine” – and when trying to activate using
slmgr.vbs /ato the error received was:
0xC004F074 with description “The Key Management Server (KMS) is unavailable” (this error: https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/kb/974998)

Trying to set the KM server to various ips I found in amazon documentation did not work.
For example some IPs for various regions are listed here:
http://cloudstacking.com/posts/windows-product-activation-for-aws-ec2-imported-vms.html

But looking in the settings file for the ec2 client helped: c:\program files\amazon\Ec2ConfigService\settings\ActivationSettings.xml (more info: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/WindowsGuide/UsingConfig_WinAMI.html)

That’s where the private IP of the KMS server is hidden.

So, then executing
slmgr.vbs /skms privateip-from-xml-file
and then
slmgr.vbs /ato
worked!

further info:

Windows Server: KMS client behind firewall

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=227937#418321

Last night, I was trying to extract all users that were not listed in one of several other tables. Thinking that I could simply use

SELECT * FROM users WHERE users.id NOT IN (SELECT othertable.id FROM othertable)

and receiving a result, I was on my way.

However, after analyzing the data a little bit I was surprised to see records in the set that should not have been there. “NOT IN” was not working as I expected it to.

A quick search also yielded similar experiences from other users on stackoverflow. I changed the query to use LEFT JOIN as follows:

SELECT * FROM users LEFT JOIN othertable on users.id = othertable.id WHERE othertable.id IS NULL

This query yields the expected data and according to the stackoverflow discussion even performs a little better. It is easy extendable to more than two tables as well.

Time to go back and check similar code I’ve used in the past!

just a little tidbit that was driving me crazy.

Haven’t used ASCW and CHRW much, but here it goes:

strtitle = Replace(strTitle,ChrW(8211),”–“)
strtitle = Replace(strTitle,ChrW(8212),”–“)
strtitle = Replace(strTitle,ChrW(8216),”‘”)
strtitle = Replace(strTitle,ChrW(8217),”‘”)
strtitle = Replace(strTitle,ChrW(8220),””””)
strtitle = Replace(strTitle,ChrW(8221),””””)
strtitle = Replace(strTitle,ChrW(8226),”*”)
strtitle = Replace(strTitle,ChrW(8482),””)
strtitle = Replace(strTitle,ChrW(8230),”.”)

2 errors today:
msxml6.dll threw
The host name in the certificate is invalid or does not match
-2147012858

which can be fixed by using the following code:

http.open “GET”, url, True
Const SXH_SERVER_CERT_IGNORE_ALL_SERVER_ERRORS = 13056
http.setOption 2, SXH_SERVER_CERT_IGNORE_ALL_SERVER_ERRORS

then msxml6.dll threw
The connection with the server was terminated abnormally
-2147012866

In the code I found the following line which caused the trouble:
http.setRequestHeader “Connection”, “Close”
Why oh Why?