Laptop Battery Drain while in Sleep Mode (BlueTooth Mouse)

A bluetooth mouse (even when disconnected, but just because it is configured) can wake a PC from sleep mode causing battery drainage.

Issue the following CLI commands for diagnostics and resolution:

powercfg -devicequery wake_armed
   (find the device name that will wake the system) 

powercfg -devicedisablewake "complete devicename above"

This should return the sleep mode to a nice long battery life.

Here's the background about how I discovered this.

EdgeMax Router slow to hand out DHCP address

When arriving home after working on another wireless network I noticed my laptop was quick to connect to wireless, but slow to get a proper IP address.  It was faster to issue an ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew command then wait for an IP address.


I discovered that the EdgeMax router dhcp service is, by default. not running in Authortative mode.  Since it wasn't, here is what was happening.

• Client connects and issues a DHCP request with a requested IP address (the last one I was using).
• EdgeMax running in non-authortative mode ignores the request because it had a requested address that didn't match the address scope the EdgeMax is configured for.
• Client requestes a number of times before it finally times out.
• After timeout client issues a generic address request without an address
• EdgeMax responds to request with an address
• Client uses the address and is operational.

I issued this command...

set service dhcp-server shared-network-name DHCP-POOL-NAME authoritative enable 

Switching the EdgeMax DHCP service to authortative mode the timeout went away.  Here's what happens, and there is no timeout or delay involved.

• Client connects and issues a DHCP request with a requested IP address (the last one I was using).
• EdgeMax running in authortative mode denies the request.
• Client issues a new request for an address from the server
• EdgeMax responds to request with an address
• Client uses the address and is operational.

Reference for Non-Authortative and Authortative differences.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Host_Configuration_Protocol#DHCP_discovery

Ubiquiti EdgeMax blocking SIP video calls

I struggled for a while trying to figure out why a SIP video client (Polycom Video) on an iPad would register with our SIP gateway at the corporate office but was unable to make calls.  Disconnecting the iPad from the Wifi and using Cellular data the device would register and make calls just fine, but who wants to pay the cell bill for regular video calls.  We had this problem with three different people and we found the common item with each was an Ubiquiti EdgeMax firewall (in our case running v1.5 and 1.6 code base)

vCenter Crashing - SQL Express DB reached licensed limit of 10GB

Twice in a week vCenter crashed during Veeam backups.  Exploring the application event log of the vCenter server revealed the MS SQL errors.

"Could not allocate space for object 'dbo.VPX_EVENT_ARG'.'PK_VPX_EVENT_ARG' in database 'vCenter' because the 'PRIMARY' filegroup is full. Create disk space by deleting unneeded files, dropping objects in the filegroup, adding additional files to the filegroup, or setting autogrowth on for existing files in the filegroup."

"CREATE DATABASE or ALTER DATABASE failed because the resulting cumulative database size would exceed your licensed limit of 10240 MB per database."

SQL Express is limited to 10GB per database and over time the event history will fill this space.

By default the event history is kept indefinitely, but this can be changed.