What does HackerNews think of vlmcsd?

I routinely downloaded it from a pirate site, but I see that it's available here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/download-windows-...

Works well without activation, if you don't mind the overlay. But what I did is that I pointed it at a KMS emulator, which is a piece of software that responds to every activation request as a positive. The internet is full of lists of servers like these, but I host it myself - basically just built and compiled this one: https://github.com/Wind4/vlmcsd

I personally run my own activation server (https://github.com/Wind4/vlmcsd), and just point the Windows installation there. Or you can use one of the many servers that are floating around the internet. Either way, it's a bit annoying unfortunately.

Also, my country's second hand electronics market has LTSC keys for sale for like $25. That might be worth looking into.

Don't forget about https://github.com/Wind4/vlmcsd which is extremely lightweight and mimics a KMS activation server. You can even run it in a Docker image.

Here's a KMS server emulator, all open source: https://github.com/Wind4/vlmcsd

If you want to skip straight to the piracy, here's an open source package for you, complete with keys, hosted ironically on Microsoft servers, that uses vlmcsd: https://github.com/ekistece/vlmcsd-autokms

It's a pretty clever hack. It runs the KMS emulator locally and fakes the network connection with a TAP device from OpenVPN. Works perfectly.

Keep an eye on this one, then:

https://github.com/Wind4/vlmcsd