WARNING -- I haven't seen this mentioned in the other discussions of the 
gotcha's of upgrading
to 7.5sp3 from 7.4sp5.... I have had to deal with the fact that the hostid was 
improperly sign
extended (prefixed with eight f's) since I converted my server from 32-bit to 
64-bit Linux a
year and a half ago.  Today, I upgraded the system from 7.4sp5 to 7.5.3.2 and 
low and behold
I'm in license hell with 15 days grace period to get all my licenses fixed 
because the hostid
has stopped being sign extended.   I should not, for those that are confused, 
that the "real"
hostid has not changed, but the bug that caused all hostid's that had the (32 
bit) sign bit set
to become ffffffff[a-f]xxxxxxx is fixed and so my hostid has changed back to 
"[a-f]xxxxxxx".

Blast-it!  Couldn't the programmers have handled this a whole lot better??? I 
mean, how blasted
hard could it have been to see if the host id has the 32-bit sign-bit turned on 
and evaluate
the registration auth codes with both the "real" hostid and the sign-extended 
one???

(Yes, I'm upset and extremely frustrated with EMC right now.... I'll calm down 
in an hour or so)

-- 
Frank Swasey                    | http://www.uvm.edu/~fcs
Sr Systems Administrator        | Always remember: You are UNIQUE,
University of Vermont           |    just like everyone else.
  "I am not young enough to know everything." - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

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