[VMWare] was Re: The pest again

[Derek Broughton]

NoOp wrote:

> On 07/22/2008 07:21 AM, Derek Broughton wrote:
>> Mario Vukelic wrote:
>> 
>>> On Mon, 2008-07-21 at 23:01 -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
>>>> No can do - if they're OEM installs they aren't going to work under
>>>> VMWare raw-disk anyway.  I know - I've been there, done that.
>>> 
>>> Curious: what's the difference between an OEM install and another one
>>> that makes this fail?
>> 
>> Sorry, I really should have been more precise.  It shouldn't "fail" -
>> it's just that you get 30 days, and then Windows (XP at least) stops
>> working.
>> It should actually be possible with a Win98 SE install.  With Vista you
>> won't even get 30 days.
> 
> I'm going to give this another go later today. But according to the link
> that Leif provided:
> 
>
<http://www.venturecake.com/a-simple-guide-to-using-your-existing-windows-install-apps-in-ubuntu/>
> down in the comments:
> 
> <quote>
> Matt Farley
> July 9th, 2007 13:04
> 
> I’ve been running this setup for a few months, but I’ve always been
> annoyed by the fact that each time I switch between booting in the VM
> versus booting natively, Windows needs to phone home to Microsoft to
> reactivate itself.
> 
> I’m worried I’ll eventually run out of activations.
> 
> Ed:Check meb’s suggestion below.
>  .
>  .
>  .
> meb
> July 9th, 2007 13:56
> 
> If you are worried about activation, you can try adding this to the vmx
> file:
> 
> SMBIOS.reflectHost = TRUE
> </quote>

Ah-hah! That's new.  Sneaky.  It sounds like they're scraping the hardware
key of the underlying machine and reporting it to Windows instead of the
key constructed for the virtual machine.  It's always possible that will
break other things, but it really shouldn't (that is, the hardware key is a
hash of certain features of your machine - in the same way that the VIN on
your car says where it was made, and what model it is, etc, and so could
probably be used to check if the machine supports certain operations - but
that would have to be a pretty stupid way to do it :-) ).
-- 
derek