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Windows 2003 Server Licensing Question

danzig

Senior member
I have a retail Windows 2003 Small Business Server Premium Edition with 10 CALs. I was hoping to start a couple of web sites soon that will each use SQL Server databases. Microsoft states that unauthenticated web users do not count against your CALs or the 75 concurrent user limit of Small Business Server.

One of the sites will have a Web Wiz Forums using a SQL Server database and will have more than 10 people logged in via the forums at any given moment. I guess my question is - does each logged in user to the forums require a license or would I only use up an available license as the forums access the database ?
 
The authenticated web users that licensing refers to is when you authenticate against the server using windows accounts (domain or local). Since (most) forums use their own authentication mechanism (typically against its database) as far as windows is concerned the page access still occurs with the anonymous iusr account.

There are some exceptions to this, there is forum software that uses windows authentication to authenticate its users and in these cases each account would count against your licensing (this is however generally only used in intranet scenarios).

Assuming this is a web accessable forum (like the AT forums here) all the web processing and sql server access is typically limited to a single account.

-Erik
 
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