WGA

The WGA backend outage lasted from approx 3:30 PM Aug 24 till around 11:15 AM Saturday Aug 25, and it got a lot of press: ArsTechnica 1 2 3, John Dvorak, Computerworld, PCWorld, Microsoft Watch (Wilcox), and many others commented - all negatively. But very little of the commentary did much more than gripe about MS 'treating us all like crooks', or suggest that MS just go back to the drawing board and redesign the process.

This wasn't WGA's first outage; it wasn't even the first time people were marked invalid as a result of 'outage'. However it turns out that this wasn't really an outage, it was a breakage. Someone inside MS promoted test code to the WGA servers, and that test code was erroneously marking systems as 'not genuine'. Oh, the ignominy! While the WGA team deserve kudos for coming cleanabout the details of the 'outage', the problem has reignited complaints about WGA. ComputerWorld wrote a long article explaining what WGA is, and how to ditch it.

Speaking as a system administrator, I have some suggestions for Microsoft's WGA and Activations teams:

1. Please give us a real support queue, with a defined SLA, tickets, and a phone number. Alex Kochis recently blogged a phone number for WGA support (it's 1-866-530-6599), but I am unable to find it on the WGA support pages or forums.
2. Regarding those forums. Microsoft, were you out of your mind? Those forums have beeen an absolute sludgepit in the past, and you should have forseen this. Of course WGA was going to make a lot of people mad, and of course a lot of them were going to vent about it if you gave them a forum. While the forums seem to have been cleaned up a lot lately, I suspect that's because you're deleting even more posts - creating more blind anger among your customer base. I have to note that I've seen a bit of surliness on the part of MS people in the forums as well - and this isn't surprising given the number of really angry people they have to face every day. If you're going to keep up the forums, do what you can to separate the angry venters from the folks who want support. And stop deleting posts (you guys even deleted one of mine, and it was a model of politeness) - move them to the venters forum instead. And post some forum guidelines!
3. Since WGA and reactivation have become service dependencies to keep our systems running and healthy, please put up a status page somewhere. We (customers!) need to have a single authoritative source that tells us whether the system is up or down, or if any planned maintenance is about to take place.
4. KB925582is a great start on documenting what admin professionals need to know about WGA and Activation consequences. But we need more:
   1. I have been unable to find any definitive article documenting all of the situations that could trigger a WGA validation check. Does it happen only on download of 'premium' content like the KB938979 Performance Pack? Does it also happen on some timed basis? Are there other triggers?
   2. KB925616 suggests (third bullet under 'Cause') that a WGAvalidation fail can lead to Reduced Functionality Mode (RFM) and a need to reactivate. Is this correct? (Kochis' blog suggest it is not.) If is correct, why doesn't KB925582 list this as a possible reason for RFM?
   3. We need an parallel article like KB925582 which outlines the WGA and Activation usecases under XP. And for any other of your OS's which implement these technologies.
   4. We need one or more 'troubleshooting WGA' KB articles listed at http://support.microsoft.com/ ... these should be a breeze for your WGA Forums guys to knock out.
5. Some companies run fairly restrictive firewalls or proxies. Where is the documentation of which hostnames/IP addresses should be allowed for WGA/Activation to work?
6. We also need to know, definitively, what will happen with WGA and activations once the protected products reach end-of-sales and end-of-life status.
7. Imagine this scenario: I have Vista and what (to me) seem to be a valid COA and disk. But Vista fails activation or reactivation. Where can I go with my physical COA and disk to contest this? It seems to me that my possesion of a physical token of validity is no good whatsoever since there is no one I can take it to for physical verification of authenticity. The system really depends on the software checks, which we now know can and do suffer breakdowns.

To add insult to injury, I tried running the updated online WGA Diagnostic tool which Alex Kochis' blog recommends. It's pretty slick, and while it passed my copy of Vista, it failed my copy of Office 2007, which I know is genuine. How do I know? I downloaded it from Microsoft themselves, and activated it with the key Microsoft gave me when I attended the 2007 Vista/Office launch tour event in Seattle. I completed several other diagnostic procedures (including a complete reactivation and running MGAdiag); I still failed validation so I filed a ticket with Microsoft; we'll see how they respond.