[Gllug] On topic - NT licensed connections

Alex Hudson home at alexhudson.com
Thu Sep 20 15:59:34 UTC 2001


On Thursday 20 September 2001 13:40, you wrote:
> With NT you have an upper limit of licensed connections imposed by the
> number of user licences you have purchased.  Now, what kind of
> connections are these?  Does it mean authenticated connections (as I
> understood it) or is it any kind of network connection?

NT4 ha[s|d] two licensing modes - per seat, or per server. Per server - 
server has CALs installed, a number of clients (<CALs) can connect (connect 
here means CIFS/SMB, Login, etc., but not IIS-browsing [even authorised], ftp 
IIRC). Per seat - install a CAL per computer, server verifies CALs on 
connection (sort of). Per seat is pretty rare.

However, it's kind of loose - the amount of checking is fairly minimal (at 
least, I've never had problems with it) and the security is non-existant. It 
doesn't (AFAIK) impose limits on anything non-NT: just Windows connections, 
it doesn't enforce the limit across apps. Now, SBS-NT was a bit different - 
that actually does do some strict checking, esp. wrt Exchange and things, and 
has a 50-CAL limit in total. 

It's quite easy to add CALs, and I wouldn't believe the licensing had much to 
do with a bad behaving server unless it was SBS or something. Check the 
system event log - NT shouldn't fail silently, it will tell you why it hasn't 
worked. Also, I've never had a problem with license checking.

Cheers,

Alex.

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