Node-Red: Unexpected connection to amazonaws.com

General
1

Hi,
I have been running node-red on my raspberry pi for some time now just doing some basic stuff. It is all supposed to be within my private LAN so I was surprised to see a connection to an Amazon node:

$ sudo netstat -pant
Active Internet connections (servers and established)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State PID/Program name
...
tcp 0 0 192.168.5.87:51654 34.236.123.240:1883 ESTABLISHED 215/node-red

host 34.236.123.240
240.123.236.34.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer ec2-34-236-123-240.compute-1.amazonaws.com.

I did tcpdump on it and my Node-Red is sending a packet about once a minute.

I don't have any flows that should involve outside servers. Is this normal? Is there a way to configure it not to do this?

My version is a bit old now 0.17.4

Thanks,
John

2

This is not something Node-RED is doing by itself. What additional node modules have you installed?

3

Are you using any Alexa nodes?

4

I am not using Alexa or anything that I think should require a connection outside. It is receiving mqtt from a few nodes inside my house.
I think the only extra I added was:
node-red-contrib-sqldbs
node-red-dashboard

Thanks for the replies.

5

could you open a terminal window and enter ls -d /home/pi/.node-red/node_modules/node-red* and post the results

6

Sure:
$ ls -d /home/pi/.node-red/node_modules/node-red*
/home/pi/.node-red/node_modules/node-red-dashboard

Thanks

7

I figured it out. It was for thingspeak which I tried out a while back. I had deleted all the nodes related to it in my flows but it still showed up as unused under the "all flows" tab. After I deleted it the connection went away.

Thanks,
John

8

Oh good. Now that you have figured it out, you should think about upgrading to 0.19.5...(backup your SD card first)

9

Done. Went smoothly. I will have to check what is new.