Cloudflare + Virtualization

Cloudflare

Today I learned about Cloudflare.

Cloudflare is a Content Distribution Network (CDN) that provides a number of performance and security enhancements for websites. By serving as a middle-man between visitors from the internet and your web server/content they can provide things like simple and free SSL/TLS, content caching, and DDoS protection.

In this case I was interested in using Cloudflare in order to host this log under a custom domain (https://dev.royrags.com) while still preserving HTTPS. The documentation on this was fantastic and all together this took less than 15 minutes start to finish.

The only real thing to note is that in the free tier, you essentially have to use Cloudflare's servers as the authoritative DNS for your entire domain.

As far as things go this is pretty incredible that as long as you are willing to give up a little bit of control and outsource thing like the hosting (Gitlab Pages) and the TLS/SSL (Cloudflare), you can have a secure custom website that you can deploy with git push and no other sys-admin work.

We're living in the future.

Virtualization

When working to learn libvirt and use the vagrant provider I ran into an issue:

Call to virDomainCreateWithFlags failed: internal error: process exited while
connecting to monitor: ioctl(KVM_CREATE_VM) failed: 16 Device or resource busy

Which is helpfully captured here. Essentially you can't run both VirtualBox and lib-virt at the same time because of contention for Intel VT-x. Makes sense to me. All credit to Brad for the clear explanation.

web  infra  ssl