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Comment by KronisLV

3 years ago

> Several comments here mention running your own CA.

You know, i feel like more people wouldn't have a problem with actually doing this if it weren't so challenging and full of sometimes unpleasant CLI commands. To me openssl and similar packages to it feel like comparing the UX of tar vs docker CLIs, where the former is nigh unusable, as humorously explained here: https://xkcd.com/1168/

In comparison, have a look at Keystore Explorer: https://keystore-explorer.org/screenshots.html

Technically you can use it to run a CA, i guess, but in my experience it has mostly been invaluable when dealing with all sorts of Java/other keystores and certificates, as well as doing certain operations with them (e.g. importing a certificate/chain in a keystore, or maybe generating new ones, or even signing CSRs and whatnot).

Sure, you can't automate that easily, but for something that you do rarely (which may or may not fit your circumstances), not struggling with the text interface but rather having a rich graphical interface can be really nice, albeit that's probably a subjective opinion.

Edit: on an unrelated note, why don't we have more software that uses CLI commands internally that correspond to doing things in the GUI, but with the option to copy the CLI commands when necessary (say, the last/next queued command being visibile in a status bar at the bottom)? E.g. hover over a generate certificate button, get a copyable full CLI command in the status bar.

Of course, maybe just using Let's Encrypt (and remembering to use their staging CA for testing) and just grokking DNS-01 is also a good idea, when possible. Or, you know, any other alternatives that one could come up with.

6 comments

KronisLV

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tomlx  3 years ago

I never got why people think using tar is hard. Specify your archive File with f. want to eXtract it? add a x. want to Create it? add a c. Want it to be Verbose while doing that? add a v. if it's gZiped add a z. Granted, j for bzip2, t for listing is less obvious, but with that it's about everything you need for everyday usage and that more than suffices to disarm that bomb.

  • KronisLV  3 years ago

    Here's an example of better UX (subjectively):

      zip my-archive.zip my-directory
  unzip my-archive.zip

    (disclaimer: zip/unzip won't be a reasonable alternative for all of the use cases of tar)

    Good software doesn't beg that much explanation. And when it does, then either "--help" or just the command with no parameters e.g. "zip" or "unzip" should provide what's necessary. I don't believe that tar does that, but instead overwhelms the user, whereas "tar --usage" is overwhelming.

    Here's another comment of mine which serves a precise example of why tar is problematic in my eyes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29339018

    I don't feel like it follows the UNIX philosophy that well either, though i won't argue that it should be much smaller (because it is powerful, although someone might argue that), but that its commands should be grouped better.

    That said, maybe things would be more tolerable if we used the full parameters instead of memorizing silly mnemonics, here's an excerpt from the linked comment:

      $ tar --verbose --create --gzip --file=new-archive.tar.gz ./files-i-want-to-archive

mmalone  3 years ago

I'm biased because I'm the founder of the company, but you should check out the certificate management toolchain (CA[1] and CLI[2]) we've built at smallstep. A big focus of the project is human-friendliness. It's not perfect (yet) but I think we've made some good progress.

We also have a hosted option[3] with a free tier that should work for individuals, homelabs, pre-production, and even small production environments. We've started building out a management UI there, and it does map to the CLI as you've described :).

[1] https://github.com/smallstep/certificates

[2] https://github.com/smallstep/cli

[3] https://smallstep.com/certificate-manager/

  • itsjloh  3 years ago

    I really want to try and deploy smallstep at home but one stumbling block I always hit is deploying the CA (or ideally the mTLS certificate!) to end user devices like phones, laptops etc. Maybe I'm missing something entirely but I think I'd need a full MDM profile or setup for phones/mobile devices. Is this theoretically a lot easier than I'm making it? I'd just need an iPad, iPhone and MacBook.

    Apart from that thankyou so much for what you've done and provided for the opensource community. The smallstep toolkit is truly fantastic.

  • infogulch  3 years ago

    GP's post prompted me to look into LE's ACME server implementation, Boulder [1], but it's pretty apparent that Boulder is not suitable for small scale deployments. But the smallstep "certificates" project seems to be a lot more reasonable for this use-case. Thanks for sharing, I'll definitely check it out!

    [1]: https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder