Tag Archives: internet

Prometheus dashboard for MB8611 cable modem statistics

I’ve had issues with my cable internet service lately. I came across this excellent guide from Duckware to troubleshooting cable internet issues and realized my modem had all the information I needed to troubleshoot my connection. Calling the cable company is a complete waste of time. Fortunately I was able to fix it with some insight into what was going on. In my case, it ended up being a loose cable. I simply had to tighten every connection along the way with a simple tool.

In my troubleshooting I was on the hunt for a Prometheus exporter that would get the data from my cable modem, as manually getting it from the modem webpage is painful. The prometheus-moto-exporter was fairly straightforward to set up. I just needed a dashboard to actually view and interpret the data. There was reference to this project but it appears to have been deleted. I eventually found that at some point someone had forked it here. It got me mostly there, but there was a syntax error in the JSON, and it referred to the exported data by a different name. I was able to fix both issues and created my own fork, located here: https://github.com/jimmyface/prometheus-mb8611-dashboard (note: it looks like the original repo made a recent update fixing the quotation problem.)

It works! I now have a quick and easy way to interpret data from my cable modem, and it is beautiful.

Disable IPv6 on an interface in Linux

After tethering my phone to my laptop and googling “what is my ip” I was surprised to find an IPv6 address. Apparently my mobile carrier has implemented IPv6. Bravo to them.

Unfortunately, when I initiated my VPN, which is supposed to tunnel all traffic through it, my IP address didn’t change. This is because my VPN is IPv4 only. My system prioritizes IPv6 traffic, so if I happen to go to any IPv6 enabled site such as google, my VPN tunnel is bypassed entirely.

I don’t like the security implications of this. The long term solution is to implement IPv6 with my VPN; however while traveling I won’t be able to do that. The short term solution is to simply disable IPv6 for the interface that has it, in my case usb0 as that is what is tethered to my phone.

This simple command will do the trick:

sudo sh -c 'echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/usb0/disable_ipv6'

Change USB0 to whatever interface you would like (or all of them) and you’re done! Thanks to this site for the information.