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Comment by tbrownaw

2 days ago

Haven't they always, from day one, insisted that their primary goal was to encourage (force) automation of certificate maintenance, as a mechanism to make tls ubiquitous (mandatory everywhere)?

> Haven't they always, from day one, insisted that their primary goal was to encourage (force) automation of certificate maintenance, as a mechanism to make tls ubiquitous (mandatory everywhere)?

And?

Automation sometimes breaks, both for internal reasons (OS patching) or external. For the latter, LE at some point in the past changed CDNs, and this caused JWST headers to be sent back differently, which broke different clients, e.g.:

* https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/jws-has-no-anti-replay-n...

* https://github.com/dehydrated-io/dehydrated/issues/684

Being able to get e-mails was an extra level of monitoring that was handy, even if you had automation.

  • > And?

    And you set up your own monitoring systems for your own infrastructure, as you have always done.

    Or better yet, set up auto-renewal as per vendors recommendation.

    Vendors - especially vendors you aren't paying - may provide some reminder services, but assuming those to be your sole method for 'managing' your renewals is a deeply poor operational position.

    This is going to get really important as cert longevity gets reduced, eg https://github.com/ribbybibby/ssl_exporter

Yes, we had lengthy discussions in itops (I had a admin role when LE was launched) about it.

The team lead couldn't get over the slogan "devops, automating downtimes since 2010" whenever someone wanted to add a new nonessential automation that does things on prod servers.

I mean he wasn't completely wrong, it was a non essential automation with high risk and very little reward (<1h saved every 2 yrs), which is why we never switched to LE for our main site, only internal tooling was allowed to use it

  • Perhaps you know this already but in the future, certs issued by a “real” CA will not be allowed to live for more than 47 days.

    https://www.digicert.com/blog/tls-certificate-lifetimes-will...

    • I didn't know that, interesting.

      I was merely retelling an anecdote about how LE was always positioned to be exclusively about refreshing certs automatically, though. As I've moved out of (dev-)ops roles around 2016/2017 so I'm really not up to date with operations topics