Switching on DNS over HTTPS on various browsers

A new feature that is hitting all new modern web browsers is the ability to turn on DNS over HTTPS, which in my opinion is a very good idea - to keep the ISP snoopers off your traffic - so they have no idea where you are looking up or searching for. Not all Browsers have this facility at the moment - but I will cover those that do.

This by association is a recommendation for those that do.

Mozilla Firefox:

To turn this feature on in Firefox go to Preferences/Network/Settings and the just select the DNS over HTTPS as shown below.

Google Chrome Chromium:

To turn this feature on in Chrome or Chromium, open a new tab and type chrome://flags and in the search bar type dns and enter. The following will appear and just select enable for DNS over HTTPS

Opera:

As this browser is based on Chromium you have to type opera://flags and then follow the above.

Microsoft Edge:

Again, this browser is based on Chromium, only this time just type edge://flags and then follow the above.

Apple Safari and Microsoft Internet Explorer:

I'm afraid at the time of writing the above two don't support it. Safari may well in the future, but I very much doubt Internet Explorer ever will.

Switching to a small footprint Intel NUC computer to do everything - unexpectedly surprised at performance

I don't know about you, but I have a variety of computer systems in my house for a whole range of uses. Everything from a Mac mini to an Amazon Firestick, all doing their job for the task required. However the Mac minis I have serve as media servers and players but are getting a bit long in the tooth, so I decided to upgrade the media server with an Intel NUC.

I decided to spec it as fully as possible and gave it a 6 Core processor, 32 GB RAM, and a 1TB m.2 NVME SSD drive. This should make it future proof for a good few years, that was the thinking. It came in at around £700, which was way less than a new Mac Mini.

Its main purpose in life was to support 4 USB 3.1 Gen2 external hard drive boxes (Akitio) for all my media and backups. If it was capable of anything else that would be a bonus, but not expected. It is attached to a 32" Samsung curved monitor with 144Hz refresh at 2.5+K - crystal clear and super responsive.

I installed Xubuntu as the base operating system, though I only use openbox window manager on it to reduce the overhead of the host operating system even further. That has been a great learning curve to show how little GUI you actually need just to get stuff done.

However, the real surprise happened when I spun everything up, was just how fast this little box is. The memory wasn't being used by the media software (Plex) so I thought let's try running a few docker containers on here as well to do other network jobs for me. No issue at all. I currently have the following running on the box 24/7

1. Pi-hole DNS service
2. Portainer container manager service
3. Jenkins job management service
4. OpenVPN service

So, I thought, I wonder how it would perform if I stuck a few virtual machines on there as well whilst it's doing everything else.

No problem at all, I'm currently running a beta version of Ubuntu and a separate Arch Linux using KVM and QEMU, and it still is not scratching the sides of what this little box can do. It's currently using 8GB of RAM and the load on the server is never above 3, even while everything is running and I'm streaming HD content to other parts of the house.

Considering I used to have tower machines cluttering up my workspace to do this sort of thing, I now have one device to do it all.

Intel have just brought out a new edition of these, with even faster processors and RAM capacity, so I will be getting one of those to work alongside this one when my other Mac Mini dies.

The Mac mini's served me well, but I have now found a better device and with all the cost savings of not buying Apple kit again, I can literally have three for the price of one.

30/01/2022 Update

I have added several more docker containers to the machine to see just how far this can be pushed 

1. Gitlab for source code control
2. Plex for home media and music playback

As before with all these services running and pushing the device with streaming and carrying out all it's other functions it is still performing perfectly.  The replacement of the installed plex server to use a docker container is simply one of ease of maintenance. There is nothing wrong with the installed app version, but keeping plex up to date now is just a matter of a "Docker pull" and I've got the latest version - no Library issues etc.

Building a small footprint Ubuntu desktop or server for old,singleboard or virtual machines.

So the lockdown offers time to try out things I have put on the back burner for a while. This little project was to build as easily as possible a diminutive Linux install that can be used for many use cases, like single board computers, virtual machines and my older hardware that I use for various tasks. Also offering complete control over what you do and don't install.

I have tried all sorts of Linux distributions, but I think I have found the ideal solution with this one.

Starting with the Ubuntu mini iso this makes the starting point very easy. You can install as much or as little as you like as you go through the installation process. Burn the iso file onto a USB drive or use it directly for your virtual machines. I basically didn't install anything that I didn't need to - especially towards the end when it ask's about GUI desktops - select nothing.

One thing to look out for is when partitioning the disk, whether virtual, SD or SDD don't set up a swapfile - it allocates 500MB on a device with 4GB of ram - which is pretty common these days.

Once all is installed you are presented with a standard command line when you reboot - which can be enough for a lot of people if you are going to run this as a server for some purpose. That takes up around 1.5GB disk space. This could be pruned further if needed, but even with a 16GB SD card, that's not too shabby. Especially compared to a full Gnome Ubuntu install which will eat around 6.5GB.

Now to get a simple working desktop on top of that I recommend using openbox - the following command installs all you need to get going, and give you the desktop above - minus the wallpapers - more of that in a mo.

sudo apt install openbox obconf obmenu vim xterm lightdm lightdm-gtk-greeter tint2 nitrogen ncdu xfce4-terminal arandr

The above is one command on one line.

Reboot your machine and you will be greeted with a login screen - login with the user you set up and you will be presented with a blank screen and a cursor - that is Openbox's starting place - immediately right-click the mouse and select the terminal.

Then carry out the following:

1. Launch tint2 to give you a panel
2. Launch arandr to set your video resolution - and save it to a file name to be used later.
3. Copy any wallpaper from any machine or website using ssh to your users home directory
4. Launch nitrogen to set that wallpaper you just saved. You can install more later.
5. Make these changes permanent.

To make option 5 happen:

Create a folder in /home/your username/.config called openbox.
In that directory create a file called autostart.

Add these lines to that file

nitrogen --restore &
tint2 &
/home/your username/.screenlayout/name-you-saved-it-as &

Once you have done this - you are good to go. Logout and back in, and you will have similar to the above image.

Now with the Ubuntu eco-system, you can install anything you like. This can be a Bastion, NFS, Samba, DNS server - whatever.

If you want to make it into a full-function desktop, add Firefox, VLC, Spotify, etc, etc.

However, the base from which you now start is 2.4GB of disk space used, which is the key to this.

You now have complete control over whatever you want to install and make this device into something you have designed and like.

It also minimises your security attack vector - as you have a lot less installed, less to update and less to keep an eye on. This is a massive plus for the whole process.

Updated: 14/4/2020