Year: 2019

Experimenting with & Moving to AWS – Part 1

So, in my work environment, I’ve been heavily based in the VMware and “traditional data centre” world, covering all the usual stuff, as well as some very modern technologies like VSAN.

However, a need has now arisen for me to start skilling up in AWS technologies. So as of last week, my journey into cloud technologies has begun, and I’ve been using the fantastic A Cloud Guru site for their great courses on AWS. I’m starting from the ground up, with very little experience of AWS, so it should be an interesting path for me.

On a related note, for an easy in to AWS, I’ve migrated this site to now live in AWS via their Lightsail platform. For what you get, it’s very cheap and has allowed me to start to experiment with AWS technologies. I’d recommend it to anyone looking at self-hosting WordPress sites. Give it a go, you can get a free month and try things out. Overall, even though the specs of the basic entry-level server look very diminutive, but I’ve found the performance to be great in reality.

I’ll report back when I’m a little further on with the learning, but just for your information, the path I’ve started down is the AWS Certified Solutions Architect, starting with the associate level and hopefully working up to professional level eventually.

Wish me luck!!!

VxRail host upgrades failing? Try an iDRAC reset

Just thought I’d post this little nugget of information; in case some other poor soul is having a similar problem. I’ve recently been upgrading two VxRail clusters to the latest code and suffered the same problem in both clusters. The code update was to the latest, 4.7.211 and some hosts in the cluster were repeatedly failing to upgrade their firmware. The host ESXi software was upgrading without any problems, some were just failing on firmware.

After a lot of head-scratching and a call to Dell support a reset to the iDRAC was advised. I assumed that’ll never work, it’s only out of band management, why would that fix a firmware update problem? Well, it appears that the iDRAC reset can, on occasion, fix this sort of problem, as after the first cluster upgrade was complete and I came to the second cluster I ran into the same problem. Lo and behold, I tried the same trick without Dell support this time, and to my surprise, it worked.

I guess the iDRAC is more intimately involved in the firmware upgrade process than I assumed. So, keep this in mind for problems of this sort, I know I will.

Microsoft January 2019 KB4480970 Patch – KMS Activation Errors – UPDATED

I’ve seen a few cases of this now in the wild within my organisation, where previously activated Windows 7 devices would suddenly report that they were no longer activated. On running “slmgr /dlv” I could see that the client reported as unlicenced, with the notification reason as “0xc004f200 (non-genuine)“

This appears to be another instance of the infamous KB971033 which has caused this in the past, which seems like it might have resurfaced as part of the January 2019 – KB4480970 rollup update and KB4480960 security only update

Listed under known issues is;

KMS Activation error, "Not Genuine", 0xc004f200 on Windows 7 devices.

So, it would appear that this is the cause of the activation problem in this case. The fix is as follows;

wusa /uninstall /kb:971033 /quiet
net stop sppsvc  /y 
del %windir%\system32\7B296FB0-376B-497e-B012-9C450E1B7327-5P-0.C7483456-A289-439d-8115-601632D005A0 /ah 
del %windir%\system32\7B296FB0-376B-497e-B012-9C450E1B7327-5P-1.C7483456-A289-439d-8115-601632D005A0 /ah
del %windir%\ServiceProfiles\NetworkService\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\SoftwareProtectionPlatform\tokens.dat
del %windir%\ServiceProfiles\NetworkService\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\SoftwareProtectionPlatform\cache\cache.dat
net start sppsvc
cscript %windir%\system32\slmgr.vbs /ipk 33PXH-7Y6KF-2VJC9-XBBR8-HVTHH
cscript %windir%\system32\slmgr.vbs /ato

Don’t forget the Windows 7 key in my example above is for Windows 7 Enterprise, grab the right key for your edition of Windows 7 from Microsoft’s KMS Keys Page.
This should remove the offending update and re-activate the copy of Windows against your KMS server.

UPDATE
Microsoft have confirmed that the Windows activation problem is, in fact, unrelated to the January 2019 update, and is in fact caused by a separate update to Microsoft Activation and Validation and has since been reverted by them

VMware VUM Error in Firefox Since 6.7 U1

I came across this error today, when using the HTML5 client and VMware Update Manager (VUM);

Response with status: 401 OK for URL: https://<FQDN of VUM server>ui/vum-ui/rest/vcobjects/urn:vmomi:HostSystem:host-10:478c8cfc-c88e-4fdb-9e1a-93d899697bf7/isUpdateSupported

Turns out this is something that only affects Firefox since 6.7 U1 and VMware have a KB article on it here; https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/59696

UPDATE – VMware have now fixed this in 6.7 U2 of vCenter which is available from Vmware Downloads