spond's blog

We've just released the latest hot patches (SP1 hot patch 5) for ZENWorks 7 - for Desktop Management (Netware/Windows and Linux) and Server Management.

Checkout TID3484245 for Desktops and TID3809227 for details of how to get them.

Also included are the CPKs for Desktop Management, if you want to deploy using Server Management (or the standalone CPK processor).

Enjoy!

The latest Hot Patch for ZENworks 7 (see this post http://www.novell.com/coolblogs/?p=854) had a small problem with the Marvell Yukon card (and any other that used the same sky2.ko driver)... it didn't work. Unfortunately, the wrong version of the driver was included; we've punished the guilty parties by making them work late hours without any cola, and we have a fix.

We have published an updated version of the imaging resource files, and you can find out about this on the "Updates  ZENworks 7 Desktop Management" TID, TID3484245. The Hot Patch itself has not been updated, because that would mean re-testing the whole patch, which would mean a delay to the next one! So, if you have a Marvell Yukon card, and you need Hot Patch 4, get (and apply) the imaging updates files after deploying the Hot Patch.

Is this helpful, or just plain confusing?

OK, so we've got Hot Patch 4 out the door, details as usual on the update TIDs - ZDM7 and ZDML7 TID3484245 ZSM7 TID3809227

This time we've got an extra thing for you: the imaging files are also available as a separate download (see TID3484245 for details) if you don't want to install the entire hot patch just to test updated imaging files - let us know how this works for you...

Like we did for Hot Patch 3, we've created CPKs for this patch, let us know what you think...

We're moving to a new way of providing hot patches, which will make it even easier for you to get hold of them. Following on from the work done to consolidate product downloads and patch downloads on one site, we're able to make ZENworks hot patches available this way also. We will put the link for the hot patch on the "Updates" TIDs for the products, for example ZDM7 and ZDML7 and ZSM7: we think this is a quicker and simpler way for you to get hold of patches, and doesn't require the use of the hot patch mailer (it's still there for the time being, but we'll be phasing it out as patches are made available in the "new" way. My next job is to go through all the ZEN7 TIDs that reference the hot patch mailer, and change them to refer to the update TIDs.

One thing to bear in mind with the new system: you have to authenticate through Novell login to get the patch, and I'd urge you to use a valid email address for this, as it's our best way to get in touch with you if we find a problem with the patch, or to enable us to get your opinion on whether a patch should go "public" instead of "beta"...

Let me know what you think...

Thanks to the work done by Martin Irwin, I had a great base to work with: I've spent a fair while over the last few weeks setting up my test lab for ZDM CPKs, and I've now completed them. Look out for CPKs for ZDM7SP1HP3....

Update: CPKs are now released:

ZDM7bkNWSP1HP3CPK - http://download.novell.com/Download?buildid=7yysI6X_lHA~
ZDM7bkwinSP1hp3CPK - http://download.novell.com/Download?buildid=pNgCcAelsNQ~
ZDM7-C1SNAPINS-SP1HP3CPK - http://download.novell.com/Download?buildid=RtXYTRuEzH4~
ZDM7-MID-nwsp1HP3CPK - http://download.novell.com/Download?buildid=Hyl9g5dGRjs~
ZDM7-MID-WIN-sp1hp3CPK - http://download.novell.com/Download?buildid=kdD7Adro64U~ 

Oh, all right, it's nothing to do with the alphabet, but it is about P to V - physical to virtual: one problem you may come across when trying to create virtual machines from physical ones.

I had a customer who needed to send me a copy of their PC: so they took a ZEN image, put it on a DVD and posted it to me (it was about 3.5gb, and uploading that to ftp.novell.com was going to take just a bit too long). I used the DVD to create an image in VMWARE, but immediately got a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) saying INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE. I slapped myself around a bit, for forgetting that VMWARE, when creating new virtual disks, likes to create SCSI disks, which wasn't what I needed! So I deleted the disk, created an IDE one and repeated the process - same problem :-( What was happening was that W2k (in this instance, but XP does it as well) had only installed the disk drivers for the controller in the original PC, and so couldn't find my virtual disk. So at this point, I did what most people who work in IT would do: I used a search engine... lots of hits, but the most succinct was this Move an IDE Drive w/Windows 2000 or XP to A New System which shows that you need to add at most four files to your image plus some registry entries to make it work on all standard IDE controllers.

The sneaky thing that I did was rather than ask the guy to send me the whole updated image, I sent him the .reg file from the web site, asked him to apply it to his PC, then re-image it, but delete everything from it except c:\winnt\system32\config\system (obviously with XP that would be c:\windows\...) which is where HKLM\system is physically stored. I used image explorer to replace the system file in the image, added the device drivers, and the image boots just fine!

Now all I need to do is fix the problem that led him to send me the image in the first place...

Stop Press: See the post from Klaus Arpe, where he points out that you can load the "system" file into regedit under a temporary hive, which would have saved me even more work - thanks Klaus!