Chances are you’ll know your VPS IPv4 address if your plan has one as your provider will email it to you on signup and it’ll feature prominently in your accounts control panel. Identifying your servers IPv6 address can be a bit more involved, but necessary if you’d like to configure an AAAA record for your domain’s DNS to allow connectivity by IPv6.

The quick answer is to run the following command and then select the output on ETH0 (or ETHn), with a ‘global’ scope that is valid (valid_lft) ‘forever’.

ip -6 a

The above command, while filtering out those without the correct scope or validity period, will get you the IPv6 address for public access.

If you’re hosting a web page that you intend for anyone else to access, you really should make sure you have an SSL certificate. Nowadays any major web browser is going present a warning to users if they browse to a page without https, and users in many cases will click away or may not know how to proceed. Fortunately, adding a certificate with Lets Encrypt is both free and painless.

After setting up MinIO on a public facing web server, one of the first things you will want to do is to secure the web frontend. Out of the box MinIO does not support multi factor authentication. Instead, the product allows you to use a third party authentication service. In this guide we’ll explore the process to do this with Google Cloud Apps and OpenID Connect. It’s relatively painless and I believe should all be doable under Google Clouds free tier.

Recently I had been looking at options for storage of PC backups. Currently I use the rather excellent Mac app, Arq, which I use to backup to a local server (via a network share). I also have the software set to do a secondary backup via SFTP to a cloud server.

The limitation with this second backups use of SFTP as a backup protocol is that it doesn’t allow for any sort of routine processing of files from the server itself. For cold storage this is fine. However when I need to validate that my backups are correct, which is scheduled to occur every month or two, the comparison of the checksum for a cloud copy compared to a local copy has to be performed on my local PC, meaning the entire online backup has to be downloaded. This has a significant time implication for verifying backups and also consumes data allowances where a destination measures bandwidth.

MinIO is a free open blob storage solution that implements S3 compatible storage (think Amazon AWS S3). Among other capabilities such as versioning and retention policies, the product allows check-sums for files in a data store to be validated from the server itself. When comparing a backed up file in the cloud to the local copy, only the checksums themselves have to travel over the network, not the entire file. This saves a lot of bandwidth and for my use case this is perfect. Using MinIO over SFTP avoids time waiting for files to download and keeps bandwidth as a minimum whenever I do monthly checks.

When working with web based systems where there are multiple instances of the same product, such as development, test and production environments, its often desirable to be able to apply a colour scheme to an instance to distinguish each apart. This isn’t dissimilar to potentially applying different Windows colour schemes to different Windows servers, or to a terminal or SSH client connecting to different endpoints. In some cases a web app will allow you to natively do this via some customisation of say the header, or by applying an entire themes, but where that’s not available Dark Reader is a browser add-on that can help.

As the name implies, Dark Reader is typically used to make light pages dark. Many people find reading on a dark background more comfortable, but many websites today have a single colour theme and do not implement a dark mode (it’s on my todo, but not today).

Dark Reader has a default set of rules that can be applied to darken a page, and this works very well if you just want to force pages into dark mode. However, there is also the option to apply custom CSS on a per site basis which allows for very fine tuned control of the customisations applied to a page. Given the CSS is user defined there’s no requirement to make the page dark. You can, if you want, just use CSS to change elements colours.

The user interface for Dark Reader can be a bit fiddly, but if you’d like to use it to customise the CSS of any page you can do so by following these steps.

1. Download and install Dark Reader. It is available for free on the Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Firefox or as an (unfortunately) paid Safari extension. Other Chromium based browsers, Brave etc, can use the Google Chrome link generally.
2. Navigate to the site to theme.
3. If you do not want to make all sites dark by default, in the extension on the Sites list tab, select Invert listed only and then add the URL for your site to the list.
4. In Dark Reader, under the More menu ensure “only for www.your-site.com” is selected. Then press the Static button for Theme generation mode. A little orangish pen icon will appear on the upper right of the button. Click this.
5. A CSS Editor will open. Ensure your webpage adders is listed at the top and not “All Wbsites”. If all websites is displayed, revisit option 4.
6. Enter your CSS for the page. You’ll need to come up with this for yourself, although there may be some online sources with alternative CSS for popular sites. Check the current sites source code in your browser to help you identify CSS to customise.
7. Click Apply to preview your changes.

As an example, here’s some CSS and examples of the changes you can produce.

/* Main Toolbar Colour */
#main-menu, #main-menu .menu-header.has-submenu, #main-menu .mega-menu-img-menu-link  {
    background: #eb8405;
}

/* Dropdown Menu Pane Background Colour */
#main-menu ul, #main-menu .menu-help-short, #main-menu .mega-menu-img-menu-link.highlighted, #main-menu .menu-header.has-submenu.highlighted, #main-menu .menu-help .submenu-no-hover, #main-menu a:hover
{
    background: #a85f03 !important;
}

/* Dropdown Menu, Hover Over Entry Background Colour */
#main-menu ul a:hover
{
    background: #c2700a !important;
}

/* Dropdown menu bolded title colour */
#main-menu .mega-menu-title
{
    color: #f2a83f !important;
}

/* Dropdown menu seperator line colour */
#main-menu .menu-sep
{
    background: #f2a83f !important;
}

Lastly, it’s worth noting there are other extensions out there that can do this. Dark Reader is one worth looking at however as it’s open source which can be verified to be handling your browsing data in a secure way. For an extension can that access and modify a page, this is always a consideration that should be front of mind.