Quick Fix: SBS 2003 Lost Cals

This is well known and well documented issue, there is an excellent post from SBS MVP Phillip Elder on his very popular blog about it and has the perfect resolution. http://blog.mpecsinc.ca/2007/09/sbs-lost-cal-recovery-or-reset-cal.html

A basic recap is that if an SBS 2003 gets low on disk space on drive C: (and i mean very low) then the CALs can be lost and the CAL count is reset to zero, or most likely back to 5. This can cause some odd behaviour if you don’t recognise the symptoms. You might see some users in the office unable to connect to Exchange, or file shares. You will also likely have Mobile users unable to sync their devices.

Your event log might look similar to this..

You might well be asking yourself why i am bothering to post about this, seeing as it is already well documented.

Well, i am a lazy sod. So after now having to rescue some of my very old (and inherited) SBS 2003 machines with a Dell default install partition of 12gb, i have lost patience with manually copying the autolicstr.cpa file and renaming it, and wrote a batch file to do it for me.

copy c:\windows\system32\autolicstr.cpa "c:\documents and settings\administrator\licstr.cpa"
copy "c:\documents and settings\administrator\licstr.cpa" c:\windows\system32\licstr.cpa
net stop "License Logging"
net start "License Logging"

Just save that in notepad as‘RepairCals.bat’or similar, and if you need to restore the CALs, just run it.

Another tip, which i have employed is to run CCleaner as a scheduled task.

You can run CCleaner, set your options and run the clean. If you Exit, CCleaner remembers your options, and you can then set a scheduled task like this, with the /AUTO switch.

Depending on how often your disk space is consumed to a dangerous level, you can obviously tweak the schedule to run in good time, (every hour, once a day etc)

Of course the real solution is not to let Dell install your Operating System for you.