So I got tired of looking at the theme that I had on this site, one of the wordpress out of the box from a few years ago. Out of curiosity I started browsing themes and I came across this one. It is called “Blogstream” by Alexander Agnarson. I spent a little time tweaking the settings from the GUI but knew in a short time I would need to dig into the code for it to add some code for what I call “Reference URLs”. These are pages that I consulted about what I may have written. I just want to make sure they get the credit for part of my writing so I made it a custom field. I liked how the tags look so I was hoping I could steal its CSS rather clumsily and have each URL be a little bubble. I also only wanted it to show on a full page of a post only. With those restrictions in mind after the break is the code to make it happen.

Just a little while ago I checked my kuma status page and noted that several checks were failing. In troubleshooting, I found that at least the ping command had a problem.

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:

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.

As a follow up to my previous post as curiosity got the better of me. I decided to see how difficult it would be to set up MariaDB/Grafana/NodeRED on my Synology 1815+. Come to find out it is not that difficult to do so once you figure out the quirks of the UI you have to use. Here is how to setup docker like I have but in a Synology system.

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.

I ran into an issue re-enabling SELinux on my little fleet of CentOS 7 boxes in my home lab. Basically when I installed them I had disabled SELinux at install and thus enabling SELinux was causing all the systems to freeze up after a reboot.