Bring ESX host out of maintenance mode without vCenter

I had a downtime recently that we were moving very old hardware running VMware ESX 3.5.  After the move the vCenter server would not start up, it wouldn't even boot!  The worst part is the hosts were in maintenance mode and wouldn't manually allow me to start the guests from the command line!  

The command to exit maintenance mode also failed:
vimsh -n -e /hostsvc/maintenance_mode_exit

So I knew this being based off of linux that there had to be a conf. file of some sort somewhere that told the host that it was in maintenance mode or not.  I found it here:
/etc/vmware/hostd/hostsvc.xml

This is what the code should look like:

  mode normal mode 






 By editing the file and changing the word maintenance to normal and rebooting the host I was then able to issue the command to start the vm:
vmware-cmd vm_guest.vmx start

It worked!