Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today I am finding help towards getting an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt. Let’s get started!
The Time to Get Help
Manually setting up an HTTPS secured service from your home is not beginner level by any stretch of the disillusioned imagination. In many ways, it reminds me of installing Linux for the first time. The system as a whole is irreducibly complex; multiple project-sized milestones rely on each other for usefulness, so I won’t see any results basically until I’m done.
So far, ButtonMash is running Rocky Linux 8. I have NGINX installed, but it can’t be properly configured to serve HTML over HTTPS until I have an SSL certificate. SSL certificates are available for free from Let’s Encrypt, but the process for getting and renewing them is reportedly labor intensive once you do know what you’re doing. ACME clients (Automatic Certificate Management Environment) can automate this work, but the installation options alone are exhaustive.
Joining Let’s Encrypt’s Community
I have made a good faith effort to self-educate, but I’ve slowed down to the point where I feel like I’m posting the same thing week after week with dribbles of progress. The documentation has far exceeded my attention span. It’s time to look for help.
Let’s Encrypt –like many well-respected technical projects– has a designated community support forum [1]. It’s just not on Discord or some other platform I’m already on. After weeks of self-research, I made an account and started looking around.
Unsurprisingly, the people I found in such a niche community are more knowledgeable about all things related to security certificates. The more I talk about my project there, the more important concepts are brought to my attention. For example, I keep coming across terms I keep seeing, but have so far remained clueless about. When those come up in conversation I look them up and only ask if I can’t find the answer in a reasonable amount of time.
3D Printing Corner
My brim decision is really backfiring now. I might even say it’s a worse idea than using a raft at this point. For what it’s worth, I made the time to glue a couple of those calibration cubes together. One drop, then press together. My father used a pencil on Sonic during a final dry fit to help for gluing the two halves together.
Side Project
My mother’s new sewing table has a fancy elevator platform to hide away her machine. This week, she got a power cord stuck in its mechanism where a couple clips jammed against it and each other. I was quick to find a 3D printed solution to keep it from happening again once we dislodged it[2]. I settled on a design aimed at holding phone chargers, but it was about the right size when I scaled it up to 200% and told it to use solid infill on the clip. My father and I installed it under the elevator and used a couple Velcro straps to lock the cords in so they don’t fall out.
Takeaway
I have never been excited about mastering a network backbone. It’s been one of those things that always feels simple enough to reach for, but complex enough to challenge my perseverance. I’m glad I’ve found a place that seems friendly enough.
Final Question
Certbot is the preferred ACME client, but there’s a list with tens of them on it [3]. Someone name-dropped Caddy, but I’ve been studying NGINX. Have you gone through Let’s Encrypt before? If so, what ACME client do you use?
Works Cited
[1] Internet Security Research Group, community.letsencrypt.org, [Online]. Available: https://community.letsencrypt.org/ [Accessed Mar 25, 2022].
[2] TJH5, “Cable Holder,” thingiverse.com,Aug. 13, 2017. [Online]. Available: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2481258 [Accessed Mar 25, 2022].
[3] Internet Security Research Group, “ACME Client Implementations,” community.letsencrypt.org, Mar. 6, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://letsencrypt.org/docs/client-options/ [Accessed Mar 25, 2022].