In my previous MinIO guides I have gone through setting up MinIO, enabling an external credential provider, adding replication, and using Prometheus for advanced reporting. All this was done with a publicly accessible MinIO web interface. Having gone through all this however, I then decided to put MinIO behind a Tailscale VPN to further secure my data.

I’ve recently begun using Tailscale for my remote access, and given every system I use with MinIO is part of my Tailscale, I figured that leveraging the VPN could only improve my security.

Recently Nintendo shut down its online services for the 3DS, having closed the online store the year prior. This event has prompted me to go ahead and install Homebrew on my 3DS with the following being a few capabilities I wanted to unlock:

• Ability to backup my physical games and run from an SD Card.
• Region unlocking my 3DS, so I can import games from other regions into the future, especially now that I can’t purchase titles digitally.
• Setup Pretendo Network, which is a project looking to emulate the Nintendo Online network and restore online capabilities to games.

The following guide will cover the steps required to get MinIO Monitoring working with Prometheus to extend the amount of reporting data for your instance.

This guide assumes that MinIO is deployed via Docker, and we will use docker to deploy new Prometheus instances per MinIO site. For information on setting MinIO up initially see my previous MinIO guides.

For this guide we will be using token (called Bearer Token) based authentication to the MinIO reporting. The process can be drastically simplified by making monitoring data publicly available, but that won’t be covered in detail here. As per previous guides, I will also look to minimise (avoid) use of the root user, with a dedicated monitoring user and permissions to be configured.

Since setting up MinIO I’ve been keen to take a stab at setting up site to site replication. Right now I use MinIO for backups, so replication is not hugely necessary as MinIO based storage is only one of multiple layers of redundancy I have, but it was an interesting academic exercise.

This guide will be a bit lighter touch than the guides Configuring MinIO Part 1 (Docker with Nginx Reverse Proxy) and Part 2 (OpenID Connect) that I previously published. The majority of legwork in getting replication going is repeating build covered in those guides. Enabling replication largely just requires linking a second built instance of MinIO up to the first. There are some things to watch out for however.

On the weekend while updating my UnRaid server, the system failed to POST following a reboot. CPU fans would spin up at power on, but there was no video signal, USB peripherals (keyboard) being supplied power or hard drive spin-up. My particular Gigabyte board, an older Z170n-WiFi, has previously had issues with my RAM (Patriot Viper Steel DDR4 32GB (2x16GB) 3200MHz PC4-25600) that required some manual OS tweaking and it appeared my old settings had been lost. Looking online other people have had similar issues. Here’s what worked for me.