How are y’all managing internal network certificates?
At any point in time, I have between 2-10 services, often running on a network behind an nginx reverse proxy, with some variation in certificates, none ideal. Here’s what I’ve done in the past:
- setup a CLI CA using openssl
- somewhat works, but importing CAs into phones was a hassle.
- self sign single cert per service
- works, very kludgy, very easy
- expose http port only on lo interface for sensitive services (e.g. pihole admin), ssh local tunnel when needed
I see easy-RSA seems to be more user friendly these days, but haven’t tried it yet.
I’m tempted to try this setup for my local LAN facing (as exposed to tunnel only, such as pihole) services:
- Get letsencrypt cert for single public DNS domain (e.g. lan.mydomain.org)… not sure about wildcard cert.
- use letsencrypt on nginx reverse proxy, expose various services as suburls (e.g. lan.mydomain.org/nextcloud)
Curious what y’all do and if I’m missing anything basic.
I have no intention of exposing these outside my local network, and prefer as less client side changes as possible.
You should be able to do wildcards with acme V2 and a dns challenge: https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/acme-v2-and-wildcard-certificate-support-is-live/55579
You would manage internal dns and would never need to expose anything as it’s all through validation through a TXT record.
You could use also something like traefik to manage the cert generation and reverse proxying:
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Fellow Caddy user here. I’d love to set that up. Can you share your Caddyfile or at least the important snippets?
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Oh that’s quite simple! I’ve been just using Nginx, I’ll have to have a look into Caddy, thank you!
I have public wildcard DNS entry (*.REMOVEDDOMAIN.com) on Cloudflare on my primary domain that resolves to 192.168.10.120 (my Caddy host)
Caddyfile
{ email EMAILREMOVED@gmail.com acme_dns cloudflare TOKENGOESHERE } portal.REMOVEDDOMAIN.com { reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8081 } speedtest.REMOVEDDOMAIN.com { reverse_proxy 192.168.10.125:8181 }Thanks! I’ll try this out.
Certbot in cron if you’re still managing servers.
I’m using cert-manager in kube.
I haven’t manually managed a certificate in years… Would never want to do it again either.
Probably not the ‘recommended’ way, but I use a selfsigned cert for each service I’m running generated dynamically on each run with nginx as a reverse proxy. Then I use HAproxy and DNS SRV records to connect to each of those services. HAproxy uses a wildcard cert (*.domain.tld) for the real domain and uses host mapping for each subdomain, (service1.domain.TLD).
This way every service has its traffic encrypted between the HAproxy and the actual service, then the traffic is encrypted with a browser valid cert on the frontend. This way I only need to actually manage 1 cert. The HAproxy one. Its worked great for me for a couple of years now.
Edit: I’m running this setup for about 50 services, but mostly accessed over LAN/VPN.
I use the linuxserver.io SWAG container. It runs an nginx reverse proxy and does certificate management for you. It’s a pretty great minimal-config option.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption SSO Single Sign-On TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL VPN Virtual Private Network nginx Popular HTTP server
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Is nginx a HTTP server? I use it as a proxy.
It is primarily a http server, its ability to act as a http reverse proxy is a product of that. Apache can do the same thing, its just less common to see it used that way.
Oh alright, thank you!
I use NPM (Nginx Proxy Manager) to handle all my reverse proxying and SSL certs. Authelia easily ties in to handle my SSO. What a time to be alive!
This video was helpful and simple. It’s no longer any hassle. I later implemented the same using my own domain and cloudflare.
Using this as well. Works pretty solid so far.
I use Lets encypt and OVH DNS for my certs, I can get a wildcard for mulit service nginx or a single cert for the places that need them. The other thing I want to look at is the Small Step CA, I use that for SSH certs
I just use caddy. Does everything, both local ca and letsencrypt.
If your running behind OPN/PFsense I’ve found the easiest solution for internal only SSL is to use the router to create the certificate chains. Yes you’ll have to import 1 CA cert on each end user device but only the one then you can crank out internal certs without and https warnings or domain constraints/challenges.
As an alternative to this you can also use mkcert to roll out your own internal certifications.
I run freeipa internally, which handles all internal https certs (as well as nice things like handling non sudo auth so I can just ssh to machines from an already authed machine without a PW prompt, and doing ldaps for internal things that support it)
For external web, I have a single box running nginx as a reverse proxy thats web exposed. That nginx box has letsencrypt certs for the public web stuff. The nginx rp has the internal CA on it and will validate the internal https certs (no mullet SSL here!)
I also do different domains for internal vs external, but thats not a requirement for a setup like this
I use Caddy with the Cloudflare DNS plugin for Let’s Encrypt DNS based challenges, should work for wildcard too but only have a couple subdomains so never tried to do that. My DNS entries are public but point at private IP ranges, e.g. nc.PRIVATEDOMAIN.COM resolves to 192.168.1.20 where Caddy sends the traffic to my Nextcloud docker
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Personally: Traefik doing a TLS challenge for a wildcard cert.
