How to improve Android Phone’s performance and battery life?

Today, most of us use Android phones making us smarter day by day 🙂 Android has dominated the market with above 75+%.

Initially, when we buy a new Android, we’re eager to install all those funky apps, show-off phone’s display by installing cool themes, increasing brightness to the fullest, maximize audio and set cool ringtones etc… This is all fine with college students, boys n gals who use it for fun and show off to make style statement.

But folks like me who use smartphones for work, email, meeting remainders, maps, booking tickets etc… demand Android Phone to be an optima.

Here’s the list which helped me to improve my Android phone’s performance.

1. Disable or try to remove built-in apps which you don’t use at all

2. Remove apps which are hardly being used

3. Disable Live wallpapers, memory hungry themes and launchers

4. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.. are all good to have apps but their background services consume memory and battery equally. We can remove the apps and switch to browser.

5. Online shopping via handheld devices greatly helps us to shop on the go while commuting to office etc… Here we need to take smart decision and install only the best one which you believe in there services and experienced it personally

6. Do not believe in mobile cleaning software, memory or RAM tools, performance improver apps etc… They may kill apps and free up resources. But the same can be done directly by us with little efforts and avoid another app sitting on your phone eating memory and resources.

7. Turn off WiFi, Data, Location Services before heading to bed. Reduce the brightness of mobile display during nights or when you’re in the dark places which would improve battery and eyes life!!

8. Reboot your phone twice a week to kill those stale and unwanted background services

I hope these steps help to improve Android phone performance and battery life which in-turn saves your money by avoiding “early” phone upgrades.

Note to:

Apple Phone Users – Most of the above points are applicable but not sure about the results as I’m yet to have one.

Windows Phone Users – Sorry, I don’t know that this thing still exists 😀

“Most of us are familiar with recycle and reusing, but how often do we think of the third R – REDUCE? ‘Reduce’ is probably the most important of the three Rs because, if we reduced, it would limit the need to recycle and reuse.” ~ Catherine Pulsifer

Image Courtesy: https://knowurhandheld.files.wordpress.com

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Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI)

As discussed in my previous blog about Converged Infrastructure, I’ve tried to gather information on why Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) is good for both SMB’s/SME’s and also large businesses.

Hyper Converged Infrastructure: is a system defined and controlled by cutting edge software that caters Compute, Hypervisors, both physical and virtual Network, both phsyical storage and as a service, backup, de-dupe etc… from a single platform supported by a single vendor.

Today, customers want to stay away from islands of centralized storage, isolated workloads, complicated virtual infrastructure, challenges in getting support and on-time services from multi-vendors. HCI will be the right solution to improve the overall IT utilization levels, reduction in costs by infrastructure consolidation and services orchestration for better manageability.

Customers want ease of use right from their personal needs to business requirements. Simplicity and availability are de facto in HCI products. A single ‘GEEK’ can handle the HCI product which consists of hypervisors, storage, network and so on which greatly helps an enterprise to reduce investing in body shopping. SMB’s / SME’s who are looking to setup a greenfield DC need to focus on HCI instead of traditional ways.

HCI enables agile infrastructure ready to assimilate to the app trending either increase or decrease in work loads and capacities. Since, HCI has simplified and automated provisioning of resources such as compute, network and storage. HCI management interface is tightly coupled with the latter using API’s which translates customer requirements, generates platform based set of commands, triggers the task and monitors/ reports upon completion. Gone are the days where IT guys like me used to spend a good one hour to provision a LUN which was later scanned by platform team and spend minutes to hour to make it usable by the app off-course with the risk of human errors 😦 and traditional processes overhead 😛

Based on the suggestions and feedback, I’ve listed some of the use cases at a high level which greatly benefits enterprises by deploying HCI.

1. Consolidation:

HCI products are being implemented and integrated with very less time and efforts which aids to consolidation of servers and data centers. Right HCI vendor and their solution which takes care of migration challenges being non-disruptive to business, very minimal downtime and data integrity helps customers to swiftly move to HCI platform. HCI helps in simplifying end-2-end architecture and easily scale-up and scale out as we grow.

2. VDI:

VDI’s are resource athirst which pose a challenge to anyone who wants to simplify end user computing. HCI could tackle such critical resource requirements by its tightly coupled architecture with simplfied scalable features. Efficient compute which can take greater workloads, optimized CPU utilization, low-latency network and faster IOPS & throughput with highly available and redundant storage resources helps to quickly adapt in the VDI space which in-turn betters end user experience.

3. Cloud:

Amazon, Google and various public cloud enterprises are the brains behind developing of HCI architecture. Due to the rapid growth and simple manageability, they decided to have commodity hardware based solution for ever growing infra requirements. HCI is the best fit for on-premise or private or hybrid type of cloud solutions. VCI based cloud solution absorbs rapid and dynamic changes or app requirements and quickly serves required underlying hardware requirements to run the apps at the best possible end user experience.

As I mentioned above, simplicity and availability are de facto in HCI which is based on automation and orchestration. Using these features we can easily deploy SDDC (Software Defined Data Center) and gain control over the hardware using soft layer. Within a few clicks and mins we can build several servers at desired configuration. Thus reducing the release cycle time, focus leadership of business instead of infra and realize benefits by reducing TAT in Go-To market.

4. Data Protection

Backup, business continuity, DR are very complex to manage but yet they are most critical to enterprise’s data protection, availability and data recovery objectives. HCI due to its nature is best fit to meet these IT goals. HCI products enables simpler VM backup, remote or satellite backups, BC/DR and data de-duplication features. Some of the HCI products allow to backup data to public cloud using REST API’s integration.

5. Testing and Development

In traditional IT, developers and testers had to depend on IT guys to get resources to develop and test their apps. As always Prod was taking over precedence and such requests were honored in timely manner 😉

By using HCI, developers or testers can create their own VM’s in a jiffy removing dependency on IT guys. They can create multiple instances, clone VM’s and use run several test cases in parallel. Business leaders are greatly benefited by meeting project deadlines, improved efficiency of development and testing teams and shortcuts in road map for go-to market.

There are various use cases out there offered by HCI vendors, have become a super hit in the market. If you know such use cases please share under comments. Meanwhile I’ll try to explore from my end…

I hope you enjoyed this post in the middle of monotonous work :), I’d be very grateful if you’d help it spread by emailing it to your friends, or sharing it on Twitter or Facebook. Thank you and stay tuned for the next blog!!!

Delete user account on multiple Brocade SAN switches

I work in a SAN environment where we manage about 110+ SAN switches of both Brocade and Cisco models. Due to lucrative market we end up having attrition in the team which leads to clean-up of their user accounts as per security standards or policies. I did not mention how we create a new user’s account when they join our team. I’ll share that script sometime later (so keep browsing my blog…),Thanks to Perl script which takes care of it. Using that Perl script we can create multiple user accounts on multiple switches at one go 🙂

Let’s discuss about deleting an user account which took 6+ productive hours to come up with deletion script !!

Since I’m a die-hard fan of Perl, I wanted to do this using Perl but for some reason, Net::SSH2::Expect module did not gel very well with Window$. Brocade CLI expects user to type “YES” for user delete confirmation. So, I had to learn and equip the old is gold “Expect” programming language… After few hours of trial and errors, I’ve finally succeeded with the script to delete user on multiple switches at one go 😀

Here is the script “expect.sh”

#! /bin/expect
set timeout 20
set user [lindex $argv 0]
set password [lindex $argv 1]
set prompt “(%|#|\\$|%\]) $”
;# — main activity
proc dostuff { currentswitch} {

;# do something with currentswitch

send — “userconfig –delete vinay\r”
return
}
set fd [open ./swlist.txt r]
set sws [read -nonewline $fd]
close $fd
foreach sw [split $sws”\n” ] {
spawn /usr/bin/ssh $user@$sw
while (1) {
expect {
“no)? ” {
send — “yes\r”
}
“password: ” {
send — “$password\r”
}
“>” {
send — “userconfig –delete vinay\ryes\r”
break
}
}
}
expect “>”
send — “exit\r”
}
expect eof

I know, hold your breath… Let me try to decode this for you and how to do copy-paste and use this in your setup.

PFB list of things to have, before we run this on management server

1. cygwin – Install cygwin

2. Expect – A good blog on howto install cygwin, Expect and ssh

3. swtlist.txt – A file having IP addresses of SAN switches

Now, copy both expect.sh and swlist.txt to a path e.g. /home/vinay/ [Under C:\ drive look for “cygwin” directory  C:\cygwin\home\<users> if you installed cygwin in C drive]

Launch cygwin and run the command “./expect.sh <username> <password>”

Note: I’ve same username and password across all switches. Hence its friendly to run the scripts. Some of the Brocade firmware versions are not compatible with the command “userconfig –delete <username>”. Please read the manual and replace the command accordingly,

After, you start the script using above command sit back and relax to watch the automation of user deletion!!!

Disclaimer: I’m not responsible for any outages, P1’s, Major Incidents etc by running this script in your setup. Use it with your brains by applying thought (little extra needed here…). Leave a comment if you need help to tweak this script…

Courtesy: iconfinder.com for the image and amsathishkumar.wordpress.com for the blog on cygwin, Expect and ssh installation

Clean your PC Desktop with a single click!

We all want to have a clean, organized and clutter free PC/Laptop Desktop Screen… But at the end of the day we need to keep all important things including that report which need to be shared with your Manager to ensure a smile on his face 🙂

It was a difficult to be organize your desktop at the same time maintain handy stuff on the same but not now 😛

Here is the simple (I swear) batch script and below steps to maintain a well organized desktop screen.

d:
cd d:\users\vbabuume\Desktop
move /y *.png d:\Desktop\PNG
move /y *.jpg d:\Desktop\PNG
move /y *.bmp d:\Desktop\PNG
move /y *.doc* d:\Desktop\DOC
move /y *.xls* d:\Desktop\XLS
move /y *.pdf d:\Desktop\PDF
move /y *.ppt* d:\Desktop\PPT
move /y *.csv d:\Desktop\XLS

Let me explain how this works. We are trying to move most of the standard file types that we use on regular basis to a folder called Desktop created under “D” drive. Under “Desktop” create sub-folders like “PNG” (for all pictures), “DOC” (for Word documents, RTF files etc..), “XLS” (For excel spreadsheets, CSV files), “PPT” (For PPTs), PDF (For PDF’s) and any other file type you work on daily basis. You can create else where there is a sufficient disk capacity but avoid C: or drive where OS resides.

Copy the above lines to a notepad and save as “CD.bat” under same drive where “Desktop” folder is created e.g. “D:” drive. Create a short cut of this file and place it on “Taskbar” since our motto is to have clean desktop 🙂

Create another short cut for “Desktop” folder where all type of files will be dumped by this script which needs to be placed on “Taskbar”.

When you click on “CD.bat” which is on your Taskbar. All the file types mentioned above will be moved to their respective sub-folders under “Desktop” folder.

Going forward whenever you see your “Desktop” screen is jumbled up click the CD icon on your Desktop!!

A Swachh Desktop initiative 😀

Image Courtesy: pcmuseum.ca