Simplified Provisioning
I have quite a bit of experience with a (small) variety of config management tools: Ansible, Salt, and Terraform. I have also used adjacent tooling like Packer, Docker, and so much Kubernetes. They all have their place and are helpful for managing server environments. Earlier in my career, I developed a strong interest in these types of tools and went through several iterations using them to manage my personal infrastructure. But I find myself losing interest in spending time on such tools for my personal work, though I still enjoy getting to use them professionally.
Getting Started with Zephyr
I recently ordered an ESP32 and found a nice RTOS called Zephyr1 to use. It’s fairly heavy - getting started with Arduino or the ESP-IDF2 appears much easier. But I am ambitious to build an OS with a few peripherals, and Zephyr has lots of modules in its tree. Further, Zephyr has support for quite a few boards, so I’m less locked into the ESP32.
Here’s the board I’m working with, Waveshare’s ESP32-One3:
QEMU
I mostly work on linux software from a linux machine, and I prefer building/running/testing locally as much as possible. Even when the host and target OSes match, there are sometimes other important variables to control, namely the kernel. This is when virtualization becomes essential, and tools like Docker won’t be of much help.
The kernel The linux kernel is often built as a statically linked executable, and it’s actually not very difficult to build.
TLS Expiry
What better way to commemorate the one-year anniversary of setting up a website?
$ curl https://0x1b.me <html> <head><title>526 Origin SSL Certificate Error</title></head> <body bgcolor="white"> <center><h1>526 Origin SSL Certificate Error</h1></center> <hr><center>cloudflare-nginx</center> </body> </html> Cloudflare Origins When you put a site behind Cloudflare, there are a few options for configuring TLS. You can pick how clients connect to the Cloudflare’s edge and how Cloudflare’s edge connects to your origin. The easiest way to do the latter is turn TLS off, meaning the traffic is unencrypted in transit.