I once ruined a batch of toasted marshmallow and salted honey ice cream because I thought that paying for a delivery was the same as owning the ingredients. I had spent two weeks finding the right honey from a small farm in the hills and I had paid the invoice for three hundred pounds of premium high-fat cream.

The invoice was in my folder and the money was gone from my bank and I felt the weight of the task lift off my shoulders as soon as I hit the pay button. I assumed that the world was a clock and that every gear would turn just because I had greased the first one with cash. I did not go to the loading dock to check the temperature of the vats and I did not check if the seals were tight and I did not verify that the cold storage staff knew the shipment was coming.

I just went home and I slept well and I thought about the profit I would make. When I walked into the kitchen on Monday morning the air did not smell like honey or cream and it smelled like a sour mistake and there was a white river of expensive liquid flowing toward the floor drain.

The Sour Smell of Wasted Licensing

The same sour smell of wasted money happens in server rooms and it happens most often with licensing for remote desktop services. I watched a woman named Hana face this same ghost and she was a sharp engineer who knew how to build a network from the ground up and she was not lazy.

She had asked for the budget to buy fifty licenses for the new terminal server and she had received the approval and she had made the purchase on a Tuesday in the middle of a busy month. The email came through with the keys and the confirmation of the sale and she forwarded that email to her boss and she felt the job was done.

A Windows server will let you run remote desktop sessions for one hundred and twenty days without a single license key and it will act like it is your best friend during that time. It will let users log in and it will let them work and it will stay quiet and polite while the clock ticks down in the dark.

The problem is that many people think the grace period is a gift and they think the purchase of the keys is the end of the work. Hana thought she was safe because she had the email and the email was her shield. If anyone asked if they were compliant she could show the receipt and if anyone asked if they had the keys she could show the message in her inbox. But the server does not read her email and the server does not care about the credit card statement and the server only knows what the local licensing role tells it.

The Day the Music Stopped

When the one hundred and twentieth day arrived the server stopped being polite and it began to kick people out. The sales team could not get to their spreadsheets and the billing team could not run the weekly reports and the office turned into a room full of people staring at a login error that said no remote desktop license servers were available to provide a license.

Hana was confused and she felt a heat in her chest and she pulled up the email she had sent four months ago. She showed it to her manager as proof that she had done her part and she pointed at the date and the amount paid and the list of keys. Her manager looked at the email and then he looked at the dark screens of the staff and he told her that the email was not helping them get back to work.

“The email is not helping us get back to work.”

– Hana’s Manager

She went into the server gear and she opened the management tool and she saw the red marks and the warnings. The licensing role was not even turned on and the license server was not activated and the keys were still sitting in that four-month-old email like seeds in a packet that never hit the dirt. She had bought the seeds and she had paid for the soil but she had never planted the crop.

She had to sit there in the middle of a crisis and she had to start the work that she should have finished when the air was calm. She had to install the role and she had to wait for the activation and she had to type in the long strings of characters from the email one by one while the vice president of the company stood behind her and breathed on her neck.

The Dopamine Trap

I used to be wrong about how this worked and I am not ashamed to admit it. I used to think that computers were smart enough to talk to each other and I thought that if I bought a license from a vendor then Microsoft would get a signal in the sky and my server would just know that it was legal. I argued with a technician once and I told him that it was the twenty-first century and I told him that manual entry was a relic of the past.

I was wrong and I was loud about being wrong and that is the worst way to be. Software is a machine and a machine only knows what has been fed into its local memory. It does not look at your bank account and it does not scan your inbox for confirmation codes. If you do not take the key and put it in the lock then the door stays shut and it does not matter if you have the bill of sale for the key in your pocket.

The gap between buying and doing is where most projects go to die and it is a wide gap because buying is easy and doing is hard. Buying is a click and it gives you a tiny hit of dopamine and it makes you feel like you have solved a problem. Setting up the licensing server is a chore and it requires you to click through menus and it requires you to understand the difference between a user license and a device license and it requires you to commit to the configuration. Most people stop at the dopamine hit and they leave the chore for later and then later becomes never until the screen goes black.

Treat the Purchase as a Timer

I found that the best way to handle this is to treat the purchase like the start of a timer rather than the end of a task. When you get the keys from a place like the RDS CAL Store you get them fast and you often get them within fifteen minutes and that speed is a trap if you are not careful.

Because they arrive so quickly you feel like you can just do it later and you think you will remember but you will not. The best engineers I know are the ones who refuse to close the browser tab until the licenses are showing as active in the green text of the manager tool. They do not trust their future selves to remember the chore and they do not trust the grace period to be kind.

Hana eventually got the system back up but she lost a whole day of work and she lost a lot of trust from the people around her. They did not care that she had the licenses in her email and they only cared that they could not work when they needed to. They saw the outage as a failure of planning and they were right to see it that way. The licenses were there but they were not present and they were owned but they were not used. It was the same as my three hundred pounds of spoiled cream and it was a wealth that could not be spent because it was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Access vs. Utility

We have built a world where we think that access is the same as utility and we think that having the right to do something is the same as actually doing it. You can buy a gym membership and you can have the card in your wallet but your muscles do not know that you paid the monthly fee. You have to go and you have to lift the weights and you have to sweat. You can buy a book and you can put it on the shelf but your brain does not get the information until you move your eyes across the pages.

If you are running a server and you are still in that one hundred and twenty day window then you are living on borrowed time and you are walking on thin ice. You might have the keys in an email somewhere or you might have a quote sitting on your desk but you do not have a working system yet. You only have the potential for a working system.

You should go into the manager tool today and you should check the status and you should see if those keys are actually doing their job. If they are not then you should stop what you are doing and you should put them in right now. Do not wait for the morning when the users start calling and do not wait for the moment when the boss is standing in your office asking why the billing cycle is broken.

Learning to Love the Loading Dock

I stopped making ice cream for a while after the vanilla incident because I was disgusted with my own laziness and I was mad at the world for not being as automatic as I wanted it to be. But eventually I went back to the kitchen and I learned to love the loading dock. I learned that the best part of the job is not the paying of the bill but the clicking of the latch on the freezer door.

I learned that the result is found in the physical reality of the product and not in the digital ghost of the receipt. Now when I help people with their systems I tell them the story of the sour cream and I tell them that an uninstalled license is just a very expensive string of text that does nothing to keep the lights on.

You have to be the bridge between the commerce and the code. You have to take the responsibility for the last mile of the journey and you have to make sure that what you bought is actually what you have. It is a simple shift in how you think but it changes everything about how you work. It turns you from a person who just buys things into a person who builds things.