Microsoft products, such as Visual Studio 2010, do not require a serial number.

Question

I am a member of WebsiteSpark and I am a member of DreamSpark. Both programs allow you to download software and provide serial keys for use.

In some software, such as Windows Server, the ISO file and serial number are displayed on the website, which I must enter during installation.

Some other programs do not have a serial key. For example, when I downloaded Visual Studio 2010, there was only a link to the ISO file. During the installation, there was no such field as the serial number (whereas Visual Studio 2008 had this field at the beginning of the installation process).

The same thing happens with SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft Expression Studio 3. Even when I downloaded the public trial version of the RTM version of Windows Seven Enterprise, the serial number was not entered.

I don’t think that expensive products such as SQL Server 2008 Enterprise come without serial numbers and online verification, so I assume that the serial number is built into the product itself, either in the installation files or in a separate configuration file, so it’s already loaded into ISO, so I do not need to enter it.

So my question is: how is this technically done? Does every 2 GB ISO seem to be generated on demand on the server to embed a serial number every time this ISO is requested? I believe that if this is done, it will have a huge impact on server performance (without caching, without streaming ...), so what can be with technology?

I want to implement the same function in the product that I am going to send (to simplify the installation, avoiding asking for a serial number), but I really do not see how to do this with a low impact on server performance.

Answer 1

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Answer 2

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Answer 3

Preet Sangha, , - ( , , PHP)

imagine that (on the ISO server it is divided into 2 parts, because in the middle of these parts we will have a pair of bytes, which are serial code.

some stupid thing

header("Title: VS iso");
header('Content-type: something/iso');
header('Content-Disposition: filename="VS.iso"');

readfile('iso_part_1');
/*...write your bytes... (I don't know if echo can work in this case, maybe yes but
there is obviusly a function to do this*/
readfile('iso_part_2');

I don’t know if caching can be used in this case, but actually the page is all the same, except for these bytes ... Therefore, I think so.

We hope this idea will be useful.

Answer 4

What makes you think that there is a unique series or that there is some kind of actual control?