• 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.
    (Continue reading…)
  • 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.

    (Continue reading…)
  • 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.

    (Continue reading…)
  • 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.

    (Continue reading…)
  • For a while I’ve been intending to set up a second ‘send only’ mail service for this site to handle my automated notifications and status messages. I had been using a different TLD thus far, but wanted to have a [email protected] style email going out. I was keen to not use my primary email accounts for these notices. Leveraging a second mail delivery service turned out to be pretty easy.

    The following is how to do this with your primary domain, and without resorting to subdomains. The intention is to be sending email in such a way that it has a high likelihood of reaching its destination, which means not just spoofing the address, and leveraging SPF and DKIM, to reduce the likelihood mail is treated as spam.

    (Continue reading…)