inside the brain

This bit me in the ass today so to save you pain in the future here is how you go about fixing it.

When looking at the SUS console you may see machines appearing and disappearing at random or what looks like they are even replacing each other (ie you force wuauclt on one box, see it appear, do the same on another box and while box 2 appears, box 1 disappears).

This could also be a very big problem as if clients share the same SUSClientID they will join groups they are not meant to be in and may download patches/releases not intended for them.

In order to generate a “unique” SUSClientID you need to do the following:

net stop wuauserv

Open up regedit and find the following:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate

Delete the following entries:

* PingID
* AccountDomainSid
* SusClientId
* SusClientIDValidation

net start wuauserv

wuauclt.exe /resetauthorization /detectnow

I do this the odd time in work so I don’t have to remember the command but it gets really annoying trying to remember it when I do have to generate one.

openssl genrsa -out domainname.key 2048 (or whatever length you choose)

openssl req -new -key domainname.key -out domainname.csr

This will generate the private key without a password, now you have a nice shiny CSR to send someone.

I’m fed up of searching for this exact command every time I use VMWare and headphones which results in me getting very annoyed very quickly with that very regular beep from the PC speaker, so I’m writing it down here.

Edit the .vmx file for your virtual machine to include the following directive:

mks.noBeep = “TRUE”

Enjoy the silence.

Here is what I learned over the last few days using Virtual Server 2005 R2.

Do not pause all running VMs, power down the host machine, change the hardware configuration and power it up again.

I found when removing a network card which wasn’t part of any bridge when you unpause the virtual machines you will find them disconnected from the network. When you shut down the VM and try restart it you may run into an error where it says it cannot get an read/write lock on the virtual hard disk.

Copying the hard disk to a new file and pointing the VM to boot from that will allow it to boot but it will crash shortly afterwards. The only solution is to power all VMs down and reboot the host machine. Then you should be able to boot all your VMs again without any problem.

I’m back with a blank slate to do my tech blog.

Expect some content hopefully over the next few days.