I’ve had my Fitbit Ultra for quite some time now and have been wondering just how long does the battery last?
Well as the Fitbit website says 5-7 days but a little independent testing never went a miss so lets find out!
The testing methodology is that I will fully charge the Fitbit and keep a track on (and publish here) a basic overview of the day, I will record every nights sleep and also point out any gym sessions ect.
So here goes-
Day 1, Monday Evening @ 1806hrs – Now fully charged
Day 2, Tuesday Afternoon @ 1641hrs – Battery showing as high, tracked a full night of sleep and about 5,000 paces during the day
Day 3, Wednesday Evening @ 2348hrs – Battery still at high, another 7,500 paces on top of sleep from last night
Day 4, Thursday Evening @ 2240hrs – Battery now at medium, 8,000 paces today with sleep tracked from last night
Day 5, Friday Afternoon @ 1745hrs – Battery at medium, 6,000 paces today with sleep tracked
Day 6, Saturday – Battery at medium, 14,200 paces today with sleep tracked
Day 7, Sunday Evening @ 1849hrs – Battery at medium, 16,400 paces today with sleep tracked
Lets say you have a Windows 7 Notebook PC connected to a high speed LAN which has some files syncing onto it, all goes well for a little while until the sync stops randomly.
You are sure there is no problem with the PC, your server that you are taking the files off or the network connection and you restart the sync.
Then again all of a sudden it just stops……….
The error message in this case is-
Sync Stopped xyz Errors
One thing you might want to try is pausing the Indexing feature of Windows for a little while (the one that keeps a track on your files to make searches faster).
See below for a quick guide as to how to do this.
This video shows how MDT and App-V can be used to get a OS installed on a PC (can use it with servers as well) in a very hands off way as well a quick over view of the key end user experience of App-V.
When setting up a Lync 2010 proof of concept today I was having issues with getting incoming calls to work. I could get outbound calls (to the PSTN) to work as well as hear audio both ways however under no situation would a call come in (from the PSTN) and ring the Polycom CX700 on my desk.
There had to be something network related going on so I turned to trusty Wireshark (link) and made an inbound call (the results of which are shown below).
After much digging around it turns out that our SIP provider had never seen Lync 2010 before and were sending us SIP INVITE using UDP packets, however Lync 2010 only likes TLS and TCP for SIP communications as such each of these packets that were arriving were just getting dropped (indeed if you turn off the Windows firewall you will see replies going back to your SIP provider saying that the port is unreachable).
So one quick phone call to our SIP provider and boom we are now getting our SIP INVITE coming over TCP instead – would you believe it we can now call outbound and inbound.
By far Lync 2010 has to be the most powerful phone/UC system I have ever seen (being super low cost for Schools helps as well) – within minutes of getting inbound calls setup I was able to dial in, redirect a phone call to another number inside the site which then auto forwarded the call onto a mobile number.
I’d also like to thank the guys at our Local Education Authority (LEA) for persevering with me for the past few days trying to get the firewall rules right to get this setup!
After posting about how having lots of RAID cache has a positive impact on local disk VDI I thought it best to mash together a little guide on how to get this cache setup so here it is!
All screen shots are from a HP DL385 G7 server – other HP server models may have a different UI but the idea will be the same.
Its time to do some more VDI testing! In the short video below you will see what it is like to launch multiple programs off a Virtual Desktop that is hosted on a SSD.
More info on the YouTube page 
For the past few days I’ve been doing a little performance testing to see just how much an influence RAID cache makes when provisioning Virtual Desktops.
The test was to create 20 virtual desktops and see how long it takes to get the first one spun up and ready for use and then to see how long it took to get all of the desktops ready for use.
The tests were conducted using-
Citrix XenServer
Citrix VDI-in-a-Box
HP DL385 G7 Server
8 core 2.0ghz HE AMD Opteron Processor
44GB DDR3 RAM
4x15k SFF 72GB SAS 6Gbs HDDs
HP P410i RAID Controller (1Gb cache)
the results (all times in mins and seconds) were-
This easy……
A press release today from AMD (AMD Launches New Platform for Dedicated Web Hosting Providers) seems all too convenient after AMDs recent purchase of SeaMicro.
The basics of it all goes that AMD now has a server class processor with a low power consumption, high core count that fits in a desktop class motherboard all of which is perfect for so called ‘cloud’ computing – specifically in the area of web hosting which requires ultra high density processing (fitting as many processors in a small amount of space).
For a little while now one of the key players in this arena has been SeaMicro with its Intel Atom powered (yes the same kind of processor that you might find it a netbook).
Of course now that SeaMicro is part of AMD it wouldn’t be seemly for them to continue to use Intel processors (AMDs rival) - thus AMD steps in with the 3200 series.
Its all just a little observation but I wouldn’t mind betting AMD has pushed this processor through the RnD guys fast to get it on the shelves and used in their new SeaMicro servers.
From a different perspective with its desktop style AM3+ socket I could certainly see this CPU coming in use with projects such as my recent storage server construction where a high volume of storage (and not processing power) is required but not that it wouldn’t be nice to have a decent low power server class CPU ticking the whole thing over.
Its been a little while since posting What happens when you put a OCZ PCI-E SSD in a server? and I thought I would give an update to its progress.
After 2520 hours powered on (about 105 days or 3.5 months) the SSD is yet to give us any trouble – that’s while hosting 3 a fully active virtual machines covering Lync 2010 install (IM/and now moving into VOIP) , a App-V server and now a UAG 2010.
The full SMART details can be seen in the image to the side (using the OCZ Toolbox) and as you will see the drive is still reporting no reserve blocks used.
My intent would be to see how one (or maybe two of these drives in software RAID0) will work when hosting a number of virtual desktops but going to have to wait until April for that!