Author: Pat Hartl

When running Windows on a modern Apple computer, the screen may be very dim and adjusting the brightness doesn’t do anything.

For Windows 10 with the Anniversary Update

1. Click on Start
2. Go to Settings (left side of the start menu with a gear)
3. Click on System
4. Go to Display on the left hand menu
5. Disable “Change brightness automatically when lighting changes”

For Windows 7 to Early Versions of Windows 10

1. Right click on the battery icon in the taskbar (bottom right to the left of the clock)
2. Click on Power Options
3. Click “Change Plan Settings”
4. Go to “Advanced Settings”
5. In the Advanced Settings window, expand Display, then “Enable Adaptive Brightness”
6. Change both “On battery” and “Plugged in” to “Off”

Why Does This Happen?

Apple does practically the bare-minimum when it comes to supporting their hardware on Windows. I can’t fully blame them, but some basic things do not work and really leads to a somewhat misleading experience. The driver for the brightness sensor in Macs simply does not work. Turning off adaptive brightness allows you to manually control the brightness of your machine.

I hope this saves someone some hair pulling!

I’ve switched from the standard off-the-shelf router you’d find in big box stores and the like in favor of a combination of Ubiquiti’s EdgeRouter X and a couple of their PoE AP Lites. It’s been rock solid, but after messing with my internal network over the past couple of days I noticed I was no longer able to access some services that I am hosting in-house. I run a dozen or so web apps through an nginx reverse proxy and open up ports 80 and 443 to my server to allow access by mapping some subdomains.

After I noticed that the connection was straight getting dropped while outside my network things worked as expected, I dug in a bit further and found two options that are probably the most low-hanging-fruit solution. The first was to enable the hairpin NAT option. This feature is also called NAT loopback. This option can be found under the “Port Forwarding” tab.

The second part to the solution I found is to make sure that switch0 is chosen as a LAN interface in the list directly below the hairpin NAT option. This fixed it almost instantly for me and with perfect time-reflective-acuity it makes total sense.

This was a pretty quick post, but I hope it helps someone that experienced the same issue as me!

The last time I wrote about my server was three years ago. A lot has changed since then. Here’s some of the main points:

• I dropped RAIDZ and have moved onto RAIDZ2. This gives me two parities per vdev
• RAIDZ2 requires at least 5 disks in a vdev. I chose to go with 7 which means I needed four more 3TB drives.
• At some point in 2016 I decided this wasn’t enough and added another seven 4TB drives in another vdev.
• This makes my entire zpool stand at a whopping 28.5TB usable disk space. For some that may seem like a lot, but I’m planning on getting to at least 70TB by 2019. I will most likely run out of space before then.
• I dropped the i5 3350p for an Intel Xeon E1230v2. This paired with a Supermicro X9SCL-F motherboard gives me VT-d support which I’ve been meaning to play around with for a while.
• This motherboard came out of box incompatible with my processor. I’m writing another post soon™ on what went wrong.
• I switched from dirty non-ECC RAM to unbuffered ECC. Sure it’s not needed for ZFS, but if you’re going to build a server, build it right. (Also the motherboard has extra features that I was but doesn’t support anything other than unbuffered ECC)

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