Hi, I was looking at private CAs since I don’t want to pay for a domain to use in my homelab.

What is everyone using for their private CA? I’ve been looking at plain OpenSSL with some automation scripts but would like more ideas. Also, if you have multiple reverse-proxy instances, how do you distribute domain-specific signed certificates to them? I’m not planning to use a wildcard, and would like to rotate certificates often.

Thanks!


Edit: thank you for everyone who commented! I would like to say that I recognise the technical difficulty in getting such a setup working compared to a simple certbot setup to Let’s Encrypt, but it’s a personal choice that I have made.

@deepdive@lemmy.world
link
fedilink
English
19M

Hey don’t worry :)

Yeah, this could be a time saver in case you should/need to revoke certificates in your homelab setup ! Imagine changing the rootCA store on 20 devices … Ugh !

Happy reading/tweaking ! Have fun !

@MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world
creator
link
fedilink
English
19M

Hmm, I think I’m a bit confused now.

Let’s say I have 2 intermediary CAs: one to create certificates for my servers (going to be reverse-proxies + a couple of VMs), and one for my clients (Android devices, maybe a linux machine).

I’m planning to rotate both CAs on a bi-weekly schedule, and rotate the root CA every 6 months. In which case, wouldn’t I have to insert new certificates into my servers every time I rotate the intermediary “server” CA, and the same for my clients when I rotate the “client” CA? If I don’t do that, won’t I get SSL errors every time I try to access something because the certificate expired?

Create a post

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it’s not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

  • 1 user online
  • 30 users / day
  • 79 users / week
  • 215 users / month
  • 844 users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 1.42K Posts
  • 8.13K Comments
  • Modlog