Set Client KMS Server

Introduction

Many large sites deploy a Key Management Service (KMS) to manage the activation of Microsoft products including Windows and Office. Windows devices know to find this server via a service (SRV) record in your DNS, however occassionally this process fails and a product needs to be shown the KMS server manually.

This tutorial will outline the basic steps needed to setup a simple Tool Sequence in Overcee which can be used to do just this.

Creating the Sequence

Under a suitable Tool container (one that you have write permission to, and that your users have execute permission), select the Tool Sequences tab and then from the Tool Sequences menu, select New Tool Sequence. The editor window will appear.

Give the sequence a name and a  meaningful description as shown here.

Before anything else, we want to make sure that any computer the sequence is run on is switched on. So lets add the Ping tool, enter “pin” in the “Add Tool Step” box to search.

With Ping selected, click the add step button (+) to add it to our sequence.

We want the sequence to fail (per computer) if it is unable to be pinged, so leave the “Ignore on Fail” box unchecked. We also want to make sure that users running the sequence aren’t needlessly bothered by the Ping tool’s options, so click the Edit Inputs button (…) to bring up its options.

As you can see here, we’ve marked both inputs as “Hidden”, so that when the sequence is run they won’t be presented to the user.

Now that the sequence will have determined the computer is switched on, we can proceed and set it up to run the first command. For this step, we’ll want the “Remote Execute Program” tool. We could search for it as we did the Ping tool, but this time we’ll browse for it instead, click the Browse button () and navigate to Overcee Plugins -> Application -> Remote Execute Program (or wherever your Remove Execute Program tool is located, making sure that your users have Execute permission to it). Select the tool and click OK, then click the Add Tool Step button (+) to add it to your sequence.

Then we need to configure the tool again, so click the Edit Inputs button (…).

Here you can see that we’ve set it to run cscript.exe with the correct parameters to set our KMS server.

And that’s it. Save your Tool Sequence and you’re good to go.