Can't Remove Static DNS Entries On Lenovo

Last night I had to do a monthly release at my company, which means sitting around after hours and babysitting the developers while they deploy code to make sure they aren't screwing up anything on the servers. Not really exciting stuff, but at least I get the day off today and a free meal just for staying late!

Anyway, the developer I was working with just got a brand new Lenovo Thinkpad T530 laptop for work running Windows 7. It's pretty bad ass and my Desktop Tech, Frank, set it all up for the developer. There was one issue that went over looked though. I'm not sure Frank would have caught it because setting up the laptop doesn't require a lot of connecting to network resources or file shares, or he would have caught this issue I think.

Anyway we are sitting around and the developer says, "Hey Paul, I can't connect to Server X for some reason." I asked him to try to ping Server X and he reported back that it was timing out. I asked him what the IP address he was getting for Server X was and he gave me some strange public IP address. That was the first WTF moment.

I asked him to run ipconfig /all and tell me what IP addresses he had for his DNS servers. He reported the first two being 216.146.35.240 and 216.146.36.240, but the last two were the DNS servers handed out by DHCP. I had him check his TCP/IP properties, and sure enough two static addresses were added. I had him remove them, but a few minutes later they popped back in. Again, WTF!

Well it turns out this is fairly common on Lenovo's. It is caused by some pre-installed software called Sendori. Not sure what the purpose of it is, but it hi-jacks the DNS settings and puts a static address in there. I just had the developer uninstall Sendori, and everything was fine.

Thank God for stuff like that, or I would never have anything to write about :-)