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.
I’m using step-ca. Its running on dedicated SBC. ACME certs created for each service renewing automatically daily. Honestly this setup wouldn’t be worth it if it wasn’t for daily cert rotation. I’m not using wildcard certs with own CA as it’s bad practice and defeats the purpose. There are bunch of different ACME renewal scripts/services. K8s cert manager handling kubernetes services automatically. Opensense has ACME cert plugin, nginx proxy manager is using external cert managed by script. I’m validating certs with DNS using TSIG. Step-ca have several integrations with different DNS services. I chose TSIG because it’s universal. There is pi-hole integration if you using that. Buying valid domain is not needed as long as you have internal DNS. You need to Install root Ca on every machine that will be connecting to services. If you have many VM’s configuration management is the way to go.
Thank you, and yes, I agree. Frequent certificate cycling and revocations is one of best parts of having a private CA, along with particular certificates for particular domains. With that said: Could you tell me more about TSIG? This is the first time I have come across it, and 2 seconds of reading tells me that it is used to validate automated updates and zone transfers for the DNS server, and also to validate domains? I didn’t think of this avenue before, but it seems very interesting to implement.
And yes, I will have an internal DNS, and I will be inserting the Root CA certificate on all of my client devices.
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I’m using step-ca. Its running on dedicated SBC. ACME certs created for each service renewing automatically daily. Honestly this setup wouldn’t be worth it if it wasn’t for daily cert rotation. I’m not using wildcard certs with own CA as it’s bad practice and defeats the purpose. There are bunch of different ACME renewal scripts/services. K8s cert manager handling kubernetes services automatically. Opensense has ACME cert plugin, nginx proxy manager is using external cert managed by script. I’m validating certs with DNS using TSIG. Step-ca have several integrations with different DNS services. I chose TSIG because it’s universal. There is pi-hole integration if you using that. Buying valid domain is not needed as long as you have internal DNS. You need to Install root Ca on every machine that will be connecting to services. If you have many VM’s configuration management is the way to go.
Thank you, and yes, I agree. Frequent certificate cycling and revocations is one of best parts of having a private CA, along with particular certificates for particular domains. With that said: Could you tell me more about TSIG? This is the first time I have come across it, and 2 seconds of reading tells me that it is used to validate automated updates and zone transfers for the DNS server, and also to validate domains? I didn’t think of this avenue before, but it seems very interesting to implement.
And yes, I will have an internal DNS, and I will be inserting the Root CA certificate on all of my client devices.