My Techie-Thoughts

Despite being around for a while, DANE has been only been slowly catching on in the last few years. But, that’s finally starting to change as encrypted DNS gets more popular and people have started to realize the advantages DANE offers. Want to implement it using free certificates from Let’s Encrypt? You should! Let’s do it…

If you run a server of any kind, you know the importance of making sure your clients can securely connect.  Many people rely on Let’s Encrypt since they issue free certificates that make these secure connections possible.  However, those certificates are only good for 90 days and then have to be renewed… that’s a hassle!  Enter Certbot…

Have a server that’s offering services that need to be secured with TLS but you can’t install a web server, can’t open port 80 or have something using that port you can’t shutdown? How do you get free Let’s Encrypt certificates? If you’re using Cloudflare for your DNS we can use certbot and automate the whole thing including renewals! If you’re using another DNS server provider, the basic process still works too.

There’s lots of instances where you need a certificate for a non-web server system. Popular examples of this include database servers, git-servers, docker-repos, etc. However, free providers like Let’s Encrypt usually validate your server by means of an HTTP lookup for a specific file and that means you need a way to serve that file but, we aren’t running a web server. Catch-22? Not necessarily…

Generating self-signed certificates is a common task that every admin needs to do from time to time for any number of reasons. Here’s how to make an OpenSSL configuration file to generate properly formed certificates quickly.