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Today, all of a sudden one of my VMware ESX Server hosts went awol. It didn't completely disappear, as the VMs running on it were all operational and the host itself was responsive to SSH connections. The problem was that the my VI3 client listed the host as unresponsive and direct connections to the host from the VI3 client was unsuccessful as well.

As I was able to SSH to the host in question, and given the fact that all the VMs were operational, I quickly ruled out network connectivity issues between the VI and the host. Inspection of the logs gave me no real clues either, but I had a sneaking suspicion that the problem was related to problems with the management agents on the host.

A quick "service mgmt-vmware restart" later the host was back in business as usual and all things were good in VMware land yet again.

For some time, I've been having some issues with how Lenovo System Update uses the computers Regional Settings to determine which language it should use when installing drivers and software.

It turns out that there is indeed a way to override the automatic language selection, without having to resort to changing your Windows Regional Settings.

While reading through deployment documents for Active Directory integrated System Update, I found this little gem:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Lenovo\System Update]
"LanguageOverride"="EN"

That registry setting sets a language override that System Update checks before it determines which language to use. If the registry key is not present, or has invalid data in it, System Update does it's normal auto detection.

Valid two- and three- letter language codes are the following:

• DA (Danish)
• NL (Dutch)
• EN (English)
• FI (Finnish)
• FR (French)
• DE (German)
• IT (Italian)
• JP (Japanese)
• KO (Korean)
• NO (Norwegian)
• PT (Portuguese)
• ES (Spanish)
• SV (Swedish)
• CHS (Simplified Chinese)
• CHT (Traditional Chinese)

Finally an easy way to override the language selector, and prevent Lenovo from "polluting" your computer with localized software you don't want.

Back in April VMware hosted the 2007 Technical Solutions Exchange (TSX) for the EMEA region in Nice, France.
After a small delay, the presentations from the event has now been made available for download.

Seems like it was a good event, sadly I didn't have a chance to attend it. Somehow I did manage to get myself mentioned though, as Robert Dell’Immagine (Director of Community over at VMware) had a list of sites he wanted to mention:

Too funny.

After the Windows Server 2003 SP2 release, I decided to give the Hotfix Scan Tool a spin, to see if it would identify any potential problems prior to testing the SP2 installation itself.

The first thing noticed was that the installation details on the download page are incorrect. The site states "Download the compressed file and double-click to activate it. It will then extract files to a directory you choose." which doesn't apply to this download. The installation routine places HotFixScanTool.vbs directly in %systemroot%\system32.

Secondly, since this is a vbscript, and it's installed in the system path, you should be able to run it by double clicking it, typing the filename in a cmd window or directly from the run command on the start menu. In my case, that didn't work and I got the following error:

Doing Start->Run->cmd.exe and typing in cscript %systemroot%\system32\HotFixScanTool.vbs did the trick though:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>cscript %systemroot%\system32\HotFixScanTool.vbs
Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.6
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1996-2001. All rights reserved.

Detecting if any updates in the Block installation list were 
installed on the system...

No updates in the block installation list were detected.
You can proceed to install Windows Server 2003 SP2

C:\WINDOWS\system32>

So far, so good but if this is an indication of the quality level of the rest of SP2 I'm somewhat worried.

All of a sudden, Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2003 is available for download. Check the Microsoft site for more details regarding what patches are included in SP2.

Microsoft has also made a Hotfix Scan Tool available than scans for hotfixes that will potentially regress after the installation. Be sure to run that to make sure everything applies properly. The tool can be run before SP2 deployment as well as after.

KB931940 should have more details about the tool (vbscript) but that seems to be unavailable at the time of writing.

Happy patching and updating.

Update 1: If you run, or plan to run, Windows Server 2003 R2 be sure to upgrade to R2 before applying Service Pack 2. If you don’t, you will not be able to uninstall SP2 after the R2 installation.

Update 2: Apparently you need to uninstall IE7 before installing SP2, as SP2 installs IE6. I have not verified this though.