How to get the Fitbit Base Station Working with Windows Server

Admittedly, this is perhaps a narrow topic but something I would share given power saving efforts at home. Given that I don’t want to leave a desktop and/or a laptop computer on for the off chance that I might walk past wearing my Fitbit I thought it’d be best to piggyback off the home server which is running anyway until I remediate the hardware to properly support being put to sleep during the evening.

As with any other Windows computer, you need to install the Fitbit software to get the base station up and running in order to send data back to the Fitbit website. However, by default the service that runs the Fitbit software in the background runs as Local System which does not have sufficient rights to call back to Fitbit over the web.

Essentially, you need to do two things:

1. Login to your Windows Server as an administrator,
2. Change the user account used to run the service to the administrator account you’re logged into (yes, I know this is not ideal but it works until I can find a more secure solution),
3. Change the Internet Explorer settings to allow communication back to Fitbit as a trusted site,
   1. Go into Internet Options,
   2. Click the Security tab,
   3. Click on Trusted sites,
   4. Click on the Sites button,
   5. Add in http://*.fitbit.com and https://*.fitbit.com
   6. Click Close then OK.
4. Install the Fitbit software as usual and link it to your account.

Not the most ideal solution but it works until I work out how to tighten things up.