Is this true? sounds legit?

ubersonic · 11 Jul 2014 at 08:07

Hi, ill try and sum this up quickly, our family business used to be run by my father and the IT was, over a decade ago, handled by a friend of his. That friend has since fallen out with the family but many moons ago he supplied a copy of SBS2003 for us, it was legit discs with keys/etc so we always thought it was a retail copy.

Fast forward to today and he has now sprung it on us that it's actually a select licensed copy for which he has been paying £800 a year "out of respect for my father". He is now basically blackmailing us that if we don't agree to move to a Server 2012/Exchange 2013 licence he will have Microsoft shut down the license and our server will stop working.

My plan had been to move to Office 365 and Server Essentials 2012 for local file storage and AD (we have <10 staff) which would have been a lot cheaper and less overkill but he is basically saying we have until the end of business today or he's cancelling our license and Microsoft will shut it down via remote.

ubersonic · 11 Jul 2014 at 08:42

He doesn't have a login any more, however looking at the installation discs they do say "all use subject to volume licence agreement" on them

ubersonic · 11 Jul 2014 at 08:54

Little_Crow said:
I'm also pretty sure that select agreements have a minimum license requirement, and being that Small Business Server is for exactly what it says on the tin - there is no way you'd meet that minimum.

The guy we got it off used to own a number of large IT firms in the 90's and early 2000's before he retired and he had major government contracts so it's quite feasible he had a high end account with MS and maybe still does so I think he's probably being truthful about how he got the software, but if there's nothing that can be done externally that makes me feel a whole lot safer

ubersonic · 11 Jul 2014 at 09:14

tribz said:
Theres no chance he would have been paying £800 a year for SBS. If its a volume licence agreement, it should be with yourselves. It sounds like he's probably been using his own MSDN or Action Pack licences which arent for resale anyway.

Sounds like a nasty bit of work.

As the CD Key is on the case not the disc I guess it can't hurt to show you it:

You think he is/was scamming us?

ubersonic · 11 Jul 2014 at 10:47

Don't suppose anyone can tell me what that disc is from? MSDN? Technet? Actionwhatsit? VLA?, etc?

ubersonic · 11 Jul 2014 at 19:45

Well I have made sure that Any account's he may have had access too have had the passwords changed, and I am pressing ahead with the 365/essentials plan at speed, however I have remembered somehting that thankfully he doesn't appear to have yet: he's our domain registrar

If I contact Nominet and explain that we are a Registrant who have fallen out personally with our registrar how likely are they to let us move to another one? our current reg is until 2017 and we are listed as the Registrant on the Whois lookup. I am worried he may start messing around with which name servers are listed and whatnot.

ubersonic · 11 Jul 2014 at 23:36

decmatt said:
Is it in his name? Do you have access to the domain account?

I don't think you understand, he's a registrar, like godaddy or 123-reg. It's in our name but registered with him.

ubersonic · 12 Jul 2014 at 00:24

decmatt said:
I would have though he would have bought the domain through a company (excluding his name or your name) which has a control panel?

No he is one of those companies, he registers domains directly with Nominet.

Caged said:
If he's actually a registrar and he's trying to blackmail you then Nominet (assuming a .uk) will come down so hard on the guy that it won't even be funny.

Cool that's good to know, I doubt he would try anything dodgy with the tag then

ubersonic · 29 Aug 2014 at 10:22

Update 29/08/2014

Well looks like we were wrong about him not abusing his registrar status lol. We have just upgraded our LAN to BT infinity and are in the process of migrating to Server 2012 R2 Essentials and Office 365 however the week before last we were still on exchange 2003 and we experienced email outage traced back to a DNS issue with the tag, ohh er.

Turns out that he or somebody else with access to his Nominet account (nobody), had updated the tag and removed all the active name servers from the list, leaving just one that didn't exist.

I was able to contact Nominet who explained to me how to use my registrant account to log onto their site and move my domain manually to another registrar (paying a fee) and I did that and everything was solved.

Until this week, he is now quite mad (presumably as he expected that little escapade to send us running back to him with arms open), he is denying having done anything wrong, he says the was a name server on the tag, and that he is going to sue me for defamation because I expressed a personal opinion to Nominet that the registrar had sabotaged the tag by removing the active name servers.

So two questions, would people here agree with me that this was basically a sabotage attempt, as the only alteration made to the tag was the removal of name servers from the list essential to the function of our domain email/website/etc (the NS listing he left on the tag was his own name server which hasn't pointed at an active machine in well over half a decade). And secondly I am right in saying you cannot sue somebody for defamation if they are expressing personal opinion right? (never mind it's also the truth).