(TL;DR at the end)

I have been rebuilding my lab over the past couple of months, to get finally rid of the last 2 windows server VMs (active directory) and rebuild everything with mostly open source tools.

I was just setting up my main OpenShift cluster when the whole gitops rabbithole finally showed its true depths - so after setting up argo and trying to implement the app-of-apps pattern I realised that my strategy for getting secrets into my cluster needed some more thought. I found “external secrets” to be the best bet for this, maybe adding some SOPS into the mix, where needed.

So now I found myself setting up a vault instance, which brings me here today. Vault and consul should be configured with SSL (as everything should tbh) and I’m not too sure where to get my certs.

I have a domain, that I only use for internal stuff, so I would be able to get valid SSL certs through certbot, but my DNS server is internal only, which brought me to the http-01 challenge. This needs a file on a webserver (under http://example.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/ ) which is easily doable for VMs.

It gets a bit more tricky for cert-manager and Kubernetes. Here, the above URL is provided through the ingress-controller, which is internal only. I could theoretically expose those endpoints to the internet, but I don’t want the extra overhead of configuring all of that. At that point, it’d be easier to just manually generate certs and add them to the endpoints.

On the other hand, I have a freeIPA server running - for DNS and LDAP - that could theoretically also act as a CA, so I could generate my own certs and import the root cert on my devices. That’s nice for desktops and laptops, but with mobile devices, this seems like a lot of tinkering, which - again - I’d like to avoid.

So ultimately the question is: How do you handle SSL certs and ACME in your homelab and all the devices that are connecting to it?

TL;DR: Reduilding lab and rethinking SSL. I have a valid domain, but DNS is internal only. Letsencrypt is not too easy because of internal DNS and cert-manager on kubernetes ingrsses that aren’t connected to the internet - DNS challenge wouldn’t work and HTTP challenge would probably be a lot of work. Running my own CA seems like a lot of hassle with mobile devices. Need advice.

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  • stoebichOPBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Use vault as a CA and support ACME protocol for Cert manager and is quite easy to use. The documentation is straight forward

    I have considered this, but this brings me back to same issue as with FreeIPA:

    On the other hand, I have a freeIPA server running - for DNS and LDAP - that could theoretically also act as a CA, so I could generate my own certs and import the root cert on my devices. That’s nice for desktops and laptops, but with mobile devices, this seems like a lot of tinkering, which - again - I’d like to avoid.

    I’d have to rolly my certs out to all my mobile devices, which doesn’t sound fun at all.