Comment Re:They hid it behind Cloudflare (Score 1) 33
does the recovery media involve some form of DRM that prevents it from being loaded into a virtual machine and still run as a web server without the hardware?
There doesn't seem to be DRM, however there isn't an easy option to use the restore CD to load the install on a generic PC or VM. The RaQ netboots from a PC running the recovery liveCD, but it is not using PXE. The RaQ has a custom firmware in place of a BIOS which does the netboot magic. There is a guy named Phintage Collector on youtube who published something on archive.org and github for how to run the RaQ software in a VM.
Does the RaQ support SSL at all? Obviously the website is being served via regular HTTP, but is it a server load thing, an ancient-openSSL thing, or does the RaQ not support HTTPs at all?
Out of the box (after restore), yes there is an SSL option on virtual sites. We haven't tried it since 1) it doesn't support modern TLS protocols, so it wouldn't talk with modern browsers anyways, and 2) it probably doesn't support SNI so we would need to use one IP per site, and we wanted to be able to easily work with multiple sites.
Obviously the thing wasn't designed to stand up to the modern internet; pretty much everyone understands that it's going to get hacked without some sort of protection in front of it. No shade against Cloudflare, promise...but was Cloudflare used due to ease-of-implementation, rather than putting it behind an nginx proxy or some other form of on-premise protection, or was there some sort of use case where Cloudflare was specifically needed?
We didn't know what level of interest the site would have when we got it online. Obviously it wasn't intended to be secured / hack-proof. It got way more interest than expected- unfortunately including script kiddies and people who intended harm. So we implemented Cloudflare as the easy option to try to fend off spam attacks / botnets / DDoS. Yes I've thought about deploying nginx reverse proxies in front of, but that wouldn't necessarily make for a more authentic experience either. But we might go that route.
