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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* (last edited 11 months ago)

As someone who has done both I couldn't agree more.

I run Home Assistant and could just pay their subscription to get external access, which also supports development. But I'm a cheap Yorkshireman so I went with DuckDNS, Let's Encrypt, Nginx and all that jazz for a long time. I'm just trying to hook my home up to Google so I can talk to it, I don't wanna pay money!

I had so many bloody glitches! I'd have to sign things in on a weekly basis, Google lost access all the damn time and it was just a nuisance.

I have a rule for hobbies, I do it cheap for at least a few months to see if I lose interest. If I get a bit obsessive, it's worth spending money on the hobby.

So after a year or two of fucking around with Nginx and DuckDNS I found the cloudflare plugin, which worked for free for a while. It was night and day, everything remained connected!

It ultimately bugged out one day and I decided to just bite the bullet and buy a domain. It's a hobby I've invested enough time in that a few quid for a solution that just works is worth it.

I think I dropped £35 for 5 years (I forget, it might be a decade) of owning my own .com domain name, which cloudflare manages for me.

I now have to reconnect my Google home to my home assistant once every couple of months instead of every week.

I haven't missed the money, and I certainly haven't missed the fucking tinkering to get it to work.