You cannot be serious?!

Who says you never read anything useful on slashdot…

From the discussion on Vista to Allow “One Significant” Hardware Upgrade, came this useful nugget:

Last week, our phone guy decided to reinstall the OS on our main voice mail server. Since it was running a “lowly” copy of Windows 2000 Pro, he decided that it needed a “server-grade” OS, and bought Microsoft Windows 2003 Server for Small Businesses. He installed in near the end of the week, and then took time off to put a new roof on his house.

Well, this morning, the machine in question shut itself off. I turned it on, it shut itself off again in a couple of hours. I looked in event log, and found that the machine was turning itself off because we violated the EULA by not setting it up as a domain controller.

Yep. Just because we didn’t need to authenticate users, the machine keeps shutting itself off. Isn’t that user-friendly?

… which was followed with:

MS has this ridiculous system service called “SBSCore” that exists only to turn off the computer every hour if you aren’t running as a DC. Install SysInternals’ Process Explorer, suspend/pause sbscrexe, go into the registry to set the service to disabled, then remove all read permissions for every account from the actual file. The file is in \windows\system32\sbscrexe.exe. Then you can terminate the process. Don’t delete the file, though, that really got Windows upset when I tried that.

Reg key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SBCore

In regedit, right click, give Administrators permission to the key and all child nodes. Then change the Start DWORD that will appear underneath that to 4.

Run that one past me one more time?

I couldn’t believe that even Microsoft could be this recklessly stupid – but a quick search reveals that this is, infact, true. The blog of one person at Microsoft highlights the problem here… as “Deep 7” said so well:

What’s the big deal to put up a warning dialog everytime someone logs in. I thought that it was understood. Servers are designed to run non stop. YOU NEVER SHUTDOWN A SERVER WITHOUT GIVING AMPLE WARNING!!!!!!!

If I buy, for my small business, the Small-Business edition of Windows, then this server OS will automatically shut itself down without warning if it hasn’t been installed as a Domain Controller? Which I might not even want or need? And if I want to fix this, I’ve got to alter the permissions on a core OS file so that no user has access to it?

Microsoft, are you guys serious?