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Patch LOSE-day: Microsoft secures servers of the world. By disconnecting them

Richard Plinston

> some real "developer" tossers out there who STILL lock their license keys to IP address.

I wondered how that could possibly work. A home computer on a dial up modem or ADSL, for example, could get a completely different IP address from their ISP every time they connect. With a network it is trivial to change IP address and several machines could have the same address as long as they don't try to communicate.

The answer seems to be that they _don't_ lock the licence to the computer's IP, it is the licence _server's_ IP that is locked to the licence. The server can control how many machines are using the software.

"""The license key delivered to you must be converted to a permanent key that is locked to the IP address of the computer that runs the DialOut/EZ License Manager."""

So the license server should have a fixed IP, or even a reserved IP on the DHCP server, but the clients running to software may not need to have the same IP each time.

I did have some software that was licensed to the network card MAC address. Did they not know about ifconfig ?

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