On occasion, for apparently a variety of reasons, the license file in Server 2003 will become corrupted and shrink the number of available licenses.
People will not be able to connect to the server from their workstations.
The following message appears on the server:
Warning: License usage for a product licensed in per server mode has exceeded the maximum number of licenses purchased and will prohibit further licenses from being granted
Hopefully, there is a good backup of the license file. Microsoft puts one as:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\autolicstr.cpa
That file will probably be bigger than the corrupted one.
Check with this command:
dir c:\WINDOWS\system32\*licstr.cpa*
To fix:
rename the old licstr.cpa to something like licstr.cpa_old.
Copy and rename the autolicstr.cpa to be licstr.cpa
Stop and restart the License Logging service either through services.msc
or by command line:
net stop “License Logging”
net start “License Logging”
Should be good now, but might take a minute or two to propagate so people can log on.