Update Manager 4.1 failed to remediate

I came across another nice puzzle after updating one of our customers' vCenter and Update Manager to 4.1U3 (yeah, some customers hold off on updating forever, I know..): When trying to update some ESX hosts attached to the vCenter, I got the following failure:




The host returns esxupdate error codes: 7. Check the Update Manager log files and esxupdate log files for more details

The logfiles contained the following info:

Remediation did not succeed for XXXXesx01: SingleHostRemediate: esxupdate error, version: 1.30, operation: 7: ('http://XXXX:9084/vci/hostupdates/hostupdate/vmw/vibs/cross_oem-vmware-esx-drivers-net-vxge_400.2.0.28.21239-1OEM.vib', '/var/cache/esxupdate/3375545638666279871', '[Errno 14] HTTP Error 404: Not Found') . error 4/11/2013 3:18:13 PM 

This error turned out to be because of a known error. Apparently pre-Update Manager 4.1U2, the webserver serving the patches was case insensitive, and from U2 on, it was made case-sensitive. However, certain patches that were previously downloaded before, were stored case-insensitive, but they were supposed to be case sensitive.

The KB article is here: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2011656

Because redownloading at this moment was not an option, we had to rename the files to be with the proper case sensitivity. The files are fortunately not that many:

From:

• bind-libs-9.3.6-4.p1.el5_5.3.i386.vib 
• bind-libs-9.3.6-4.p1.el5_5.3.x86_64.vib 
• bind-utils-9.3.6-4.p1.el5_5.3.x86_64.vib 
• bind-libs-9.3.6-4.p1.el5_5.3.i386.vib 
• cross_oem-vmware-esx-drivers-net-vxge_400.2.0.28.21239-1oem.vib 
• cross_oem-vmware-esx-drivers-scsi-3w-9xxx_400.2.26.08.036vm40-1oem.vib 
• vmware-esx_swmgmt_provider-4x.1.0.1-1.4.348481.vib

To (note the bold typeface):

• bind-libs-9.3.6-4.P1.el5_5.3.i386.vib 
• bind-libs-9.3.6-4.P1.el5_5.3.x86_64.vib 
• bind-utils-9.3.6-4.P1.el5_5.3.x86_64.vib 
• bind-libs-9.3.6-4.P1.el5_5.3.i386.vib 
• cross_oem-vmware-esx-drivers-net-vxge_400.2.0.28.21239-1OEM.vib 
• cross_oem-vmware-esx-drivers-scsi-3w-9xxx_400.2.26.08.036vm40-1OEM.vib 
• vmware-esx_swMgmt_provider-4x.1.0.1-1.4.348481.vib