MindlessTux

Docker and cloudflared

Some time ago Cloudflare opened up tunneling traffic from origin servers to theirs negating the need for nat punches or breaking out the credit card. This is great for say home use or someone behind a cg-nat that wants to self-host. Not so good for solving gaming issues. I found that you can run their software fairly easily on most systems but I have had one nagging thing that I wanted to try. I finally sat down and figured some of it out. I wanted to run the docker container of cloudflared. My problem has been that there has been kinda poor documentation on the how to get it going. Not saying it does not exist, it’s just not obvious on the steps. Today I will demystify some of this below:

Rant: IRS Scam Phone Calls

Normally I ignore these calls as they are the scum of the earth and don’t deserve my time. Today however I am expecting a call from a service tech from any possible phone number and thus I have to listen to any calls that come in today to make sure I don’t miss the call. Sadly this has me trolling through the voicemails that I just ignored entirely. I am just amazed that people fall for these types of calls all the time that makes these scams popular.

Monitoring my cable modem signal levels for problems

Recently I got the itch to learn something new and I chose to explore Grafana. Of course, I needed something to graph or make a dashboard out of. So I pondered for a while and during that time I had some trouble with my internet connection. This of course had me looking at my cable modem stats page and that’s where I found my inspiration. So many numbers that are a point in time snapshot that I wished I had a historical graph of. So I set about figuring out how to install Grafana in docker and pull the data in. I quickly found that grafana is a display thing and not a collector and display. This meant that I had to collect the data and store it so that grafana could display it. For this, I figured I could store it in MariaDB, as using that in grafana looked simple enough. The problem I had was getting the data off of the modems stats page. I plinked around with a bash script and a python script, neither did that great for me. About this time I remembered that nodered has some power to it and tried that. I managed to pull the data and store it into MariaDB via nodered. I then managed to display the data via grafana and was rather satisfied with myself.