Ok guys,
I have a question about the philosophy of MC (de-) activation after having an issue at one of my clients.
One of 5 HP z420 had a problem that required a system restore (f11 during boot). On these machines MC was activated by downloading the "bin" files through another pc as these machines do not have internet. Those bin files were backed up on ISIS.
After the system restore and re-install of MC the activation gives an error that the device-ID does not match between the newly generated one and the one inside the bin file. Because in this case I had kept a screenshot during the first activation I could indeed confirm that this message was true. (creating a copy of the bin file and replacing the device-ID with the old one did not work).
Of course I can't download a new bin file without asking support to manually de-activate for me which I've already done.
But now comes the question... let's say I want to prevent this next time.. How?
Device-ID's, even when not changing anything on a machine, are not reliable obviously. I do not expect Avid to explain on a public forum how the device-ID's are generated so I assume learning how to prevent Device-ID changes is not an option. But manually de-activating on a different PC that's connected to the internet is also not possible AFAIK.
So what's the score Avid on de-activating a machine that's not connected to the internet?