NI3

I’ll be participating in the LiveStrong Challenge this weekend in Portland, OR. The Lance Armstrong Foundation has been a source of support, information, and assistance for me while dealing with my wife’s and my father’s cancers. They have provided medical information, potential clinical trials that might be suitable for their types of cancers, and help finding the way when times get tough. The Lance Armstrong Foundation is also the only non-profit organization that issues grants for researching the two types of cancers that have so drastically affect my family. I have registered for the 100 mile bicycle course and will be busting up the course all day. I’m sure I’ll be in pain when I finish but it is in no way close to the pain that my wife and father have had to endure. I am happy to suffer this pain so that others may benefit from the services and information that the Lance Armstrong Foundation provides. If you want to help me feel the pain and join me in the fight with cancer, please donate to the Lance Armstrong Foundation via my LiveStrong Challenge web site. Any and every donation may help point a family a direction that means the difference between life and death of a loved one or help fund a research project that increases the survival rates for different types of cancer patients. At the very least, any and every donation is greatly appreciated.

I am connected to the Verizon Wireless data network in Delhi, India!! I would have never have expected I’d be able to do this. Albeit, 1xRTT and not EvDO it beats not being connected at all!! Holy cow!!

A cool inbox assistant: Xobni. This little utility brings Gmail like features to Outlook and connects people/contacts with content on your desktop. Very cool stuff.

Here are a few other very cool nuggets from this morning’s presentations:

• Photosynth
• Big Picture
• WorldWide Telescope

I am at Microsoft this week for my company’s annual executive briefing. One of the first presentations this morning was from Microsoft Research. We learned about HoneyMonkeys. Honey Monkeys are the active equivalent of Honey Pots. Read What Is Strider HoneyMonkey?

My brother and I rode the Reach The Beach ride this last week and completed our first century ride. It is an experience I’ll never forget and an experience I hope to have many more times. Here are our stats from the ride:

• Ride time - 6 hours 17 minutes and 15 seconds
• Ride distance - 101.54 miles
• Average Speed - 16.14mph
• Max Speed - 38.16mph
• Maps - Portland to Amity and Amity to The Beach

Note Amity #2 and Amity #3 in the Amity to The Beach map. Yes, that’s right, over ten miles of steady climbing. A head wind of about 15mph, 99-degree heat, and the climb made life absolutely miserable for almost one hour. Portland, #1, #2, and #3 were no fun, either. The medics and EMT’s attending the course were very busy.

Next ride: 7 Hills of Kirkland on 26 May. We are doing the metric century (62 miles) on this ride.

After upgrading Lab Manager to 2.5.3 (Build 666), ESX to 3.5 Update 1, verifying the upgrades, and upgrading VMware Tools automatically via the Virtual Infrastructure Client 2.5 you may find that all of your Windows Server 2003 virtual machines had their network settings reset to obtain their configuration via DHCP. If you are anything like us, you are not running DHCP in your Lab Manager environment. Upon logging into your Windows Server 2003 VM’s via the console you will see that your VM’s networking is not functioning properly. Or, you may find that you cannot RDP or VNC into these VM’s as you could in the past. Upon logging into these VM’s and attempting to set the IP address and configuration manually, you will be met with the following error message:

This only affected Windows server VM’s, not XP workstation VM’s.
Resolution: In working with VMware support they conveyed the following procedure as the resolution. Removing all non-present network adapters resolved the problem in most cases. Non-present network adapters can be viewed and removed in Device Manager by doing the following:

1. Open a command prompt.
2. Type “set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1” at the command prompt and press Enter.
3. In the same command prompt window type “devmgmt.msc” and press Enter. This must be typed in the same command prompt window that the “set” command was entered in order to maintain the session variable that was set.
4. This will open Device Manager. From the View menu in Device Manager select “Show Non-Present Devices.” This will cause the tree in the Device Manager to refresh.
5. Expand the “Network Adapters” node in the tree by clicking on the plus sign. This will expand the list of installed and non-present network adapters. Non-present network adapters will appear grayed out in the list.
6. Select and right click each of the grayed out adapters.
7. From the right click menu select “Uninstall.” This will remove the non-present adapters.
8. Reboot your VM. Networking should be functioning as expect upon reboot.

No reinstallation of VMware Tool or Lab Manager Tools is required.

Root Cause: It would appear that upon automatically upgrading the VMware Tools networking adapters and settings were manipulating in such a way that non-present adapter(s) were left behind or not removed and the appropriate networking settings were not applied to the new adapter(s). This happened on VM’s with and without Lab Manager Tools installed on them. It is highly likely that the automatic upgrade process implemented by VMware in the Virtual Infrastructure Client is the root cause of the problem. However, there is a chance that it may be related to how the new version of VMware Tools interprets existing configurations within VM guest operating systems. In any case, the problem resides within the binary portion of the system which is inaccessible to and not configurable by end users.

Caveats: This resolution procedure did not work with all VM’s for reasons unknown. In order to restore networking on these VM’s we had to create a template of them and create a new VM’s from that template in order to restore them to working order. However, the net affect was that the VM’s then had different IP addresses. There is no known reason why this procedure would not work for other VM’s for which the procedure above was unable to restore properly functioning networking services. Below is the procedure we used. All of this work is done within the Lab Manager web console.

1. From the VM’s mouse over menu select “Create Template” from this VM after you shutdown the VM.
2. All of the data required to create a template in the next screen. Ensure that you somewhere maintain the original name of the VM. The original name of the VM will be required when creating the new VM from the template in order to maintain proper functioning of service that depend on the name of the host (e.g. SQL Server).
3. Click “Create Template” at the bottom of the page when you have entered all of your information. This will create a new template in the Lab Manager Template repository.
4. Find the new template in the Template repository and mouse over the name of the template.
5. From the mouse over menu click “Consolidate.” This will bring all of the disk chucks that comprise this template into a single, contiguous set of tracks on disk. This may take a while and is dependent upon the size of the original VM.
6. Once the new template has been consolidated you can delete the original VM by undeploying and deleting it from its configuration.
7. Next you need to reinstall Lab Manager Tools in the template. You do this by deploying the VM and logging into it.
8. You must uninstall any existing Lab Manager Tools installation before you attempt another install.
9. Once you have installed and made any configuration changes to the VM template you wish to make, shutdown the VM.
10. Undeploy the VM template.
11. Publish the VM template.
12. Mark it as Shared.
13. Now add a new VM to the configuration from which the original VM came using the template you just created. Make sure that the new VM has the exact same name as the original VM. Make sure that this VM receives a different IP address than the original VM.
14. Deploy the new VM.
15. Log into the new VM and verify its networking configuration and that everything is working properly.
16. You have just revived a VM that was close to having to be terminated and saved all of your data, installed applications and associated configurations.
17. Congratulate yourself and now go and make sure that the applications and other VM’s that depend on this one are reconfigured to use the new IP address and that they can utilize the new VM in the same manners as the old one.

Since my last post a lot has happened. Shellie has only one more treatment left in her currently prescribed regimen. She is responding very well. As a matter of fact, her oncologist declared her radiologically N.E.D (No Evidence of Disease). Yet, there remains a single, small focal point of activity that the doctor believes will be cleared up with the treatment she just had and the next one. We are very relieved. This was the worst recurrence since her original diagnosis. It’s looking like Shellie will get to take the Summer off of all drugs and treatments, with the occasional doctor’s visit. We are all very excited and are starting to plan some trips for this Summer. It will be a much needed break for everyone.

We got some bad news on Friday. Shellie has to return to front-line chemotherapy this next week. It’s like 2005 all over again. She has been undergoing active treatment for a year now. In December we found out that there were two lymph nodes that were growing is size and metabolic activity, which was down from the five earlier in the year. She had new scans done this last week which resulted in finding five new active lymph nodes in her abdomen and five more in her neck. That’s a wildfire like spread in just eight weeks. This rapid spreading has unnerved us more than anything else. Shellie will be starting a three cycle treatment of ixempra this next Tuesday. After three cycles she will be rescanned and we’ll reassess the treatment options at that time. In the next nine weeks we will be pursuing aggressive evaluation options by consulting with her previous doctors at Scripps in San Diego and getting into the Inflammatory Breast Cancer Center at MD Anderson in Houston. Over this weekend we have started our crisis planning, again, and lining up support and care for Molly. Molly is very aware of what’s going and we had to have a talk with her Friday evening about what is going on. She understood some of it, but not all of it.

Mobile phones are great but they don’t let you keep track of your kids, unless of course you have access to the wireless carrier’s network location services. I’ve been researching personal GPS tracking for a while now and have located a couple of devices and services I’d like to pass on. SPOT Satellite Messenger was the first to market and they hit a sweet spot — no pun intended — in adventure sports and search and rescue. SPOT has saved more than a few lives. SPOT is small and easy to place in a school backpack without adding much weight or taking up a lot of room. The price is reasonable and all service plans offer unlimited use of the “check in” feature. The next closest competitor to SPOT is WalkAbout, which has not launched in the US yet. WalkAbout looks a lot more expensive than SPOT at $19.95 or $29.95 per month plus usage fees. If you aren’t interested in getting real-time updates on your child’s location there is TrackStick, a USB GPS coordinate collector which can later be downloaded to a computer and the paths plotted on Google Earth.