this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
62 points (100.0% liked)

Selfhosted

40383 readers
665 users here now

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!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
ruud
Loki
CannaVet
devve
HybridSarcasm
[email protected]
62
Do you run a private CA? Could you tell me about your certificate setup if you do? (self.selfhosted)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by MigratingtoLemmy to c/selfhosted
60 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Not really, although now that I have certs for those anyway, maybe I should.
More like I'm using some services on the go that I want to always work, whether I'm on the LAN or on the go.
Opening home automation or 3d printers to the Internet is unwise to say the least.
mTLS in the reverse proxy for those allows me to have more security without having to establish a VPN first.

[–] MigratingtoLemmy 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Oh, that's a great idea! Indeed, using certificates to identify yourself would work quite well in such a scenario. Whilst I would always use a VPN server, this has given me something new to think about! Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What's nice is it provides a similar level of protection to using a VPN with PKI, but just for that specific subdomain. While a VPN would be have to be connected manually before use (or all the time), this is built-in.

The odds of someone breaking through the mTLS and breaking through that application's security at the same time are much smaller than either separately.
If you don't have a valid cert, you're dropped by the reverse proxy before anything even gets passed to the server behind it.

I'm a big fan of it.

[–] MigratingtoLemmy 2 points 11 months ago

I'll take a look, thanks!