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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.

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Do you run a private CA? Could you tell me about your certificate setup if you do? (lemmy.world)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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

Thank you for your comment. My apologies in replying so late.

After reading a bit more and thinking about my setup, I think I will run intermediate CAs. Specifically, because I want to set up an ad-hoc mTLS setup, I might keep intermediate CAs for different classes of devices/different purposes. I will need to delve deeper into it, but for now, I think I have a grasp on the idea I need to implement, in which case, intermediate CAs will likely be a better idea. Thank you.

Thanks for the material, it would seem that I have a lot of reading left to do :)

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

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 !

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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?