476
submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Who benefits from this? Even though Let’s Encrypt stresses that most site operators will do fine sticking with ordinary domain certificates, there are still scenarios where a numeric identifier is the only practical choice:

Infrastructure services such as DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) – where clients may pin a literal IP address for performance or censorship-evasion reasons.
IoT and home-lab devices – think network-attached storage boxes, for example, living behind static WAN addresses.
Ephemeral cloud workloads – short-lived back-end servers that spin up with public IPs faster than DNS records can propagate.
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top new old
[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

This could go a long way towards fighting online censorship. One less issue when an authoritarian overreach gets your domain seized. Pretty awesome.

[-] [email protected] 121 points 3 days ago

Can I get a cert for 127.0.0.1 ? /s

[-] [email protected] 107 points 3 days ago

How many bits is a /s mask?

[-] [email protected] 19 points 2 days ago
[-] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

Is that the same i as the squareroot of -1?

[-] [email protected] 45 points 3 days ago

The down votes are from people who work in IT support that have to deal with idiots that play with things they dont understand.

[-] [email protected] 20 points 3 days ago

It’s unfortunate they don’t know what /s means

[-] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

It obviously means "secure"

[-] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

We do, it's just that those users will also often go "nah, I'm just joking!" then do some shit anyways.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

How do I setup a reverse proxy for pure TCP? /s

[-] [email protected] 15 points 3 days ago

Think that's called NATing

[-] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

You can based on the port.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

It's called buying more static IPs and making your ISP deal with it haha

load more comments (2 replies)
[-] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago

Is /s more or less IPs than /24? I need lots of IPs in case I want to expand

[-] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago

This would actually be useful for local testing of software during development.

load more comments (2 replies)
[-] [email protected] 16 points 2 days ago

F I N A L L Y

Now tell me it supports IPv6 and I'll be the happiest man alive

load more comments (7 replies)
[-] [email protected] 53 points 3 days ago

That's kind of awesome! I have a bunch of home lab stuff, but have been putting off buying a domain (I was a broke college student when I started my lab and half the point was avoiding recurring costs- plus I already run the DNS, as far as the WAN is concerned, I have whatever domain I want). My loose plan was to stand up a certificate authority and push the root public key out with active directory, but being able to certify things against Let's Encrypt might make things significantly easier.

[-] [email protected] 19 points 3 days ago

FYI you can get a numeric xyz domain for 1$ a year

load more comments (3 replies)
[-] [email protected] 15 points 3 days ago

Setting up a root and a immediate CA is significantly more fun though ;) It's also teaches you more about PKI which is a good skill to have.

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago

I use a domain, but for homelab I eventually switched to my own internal CA.

Instead of having to do service.domain.tld it's nice to do service.lan.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

Any good instructions you would recommend for doing this?

[-] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

I just use openssl"s built in management. I have scripts that set it up and generate a .lan domain, and instructions for adding it to clients. I could make a repo and writeup if you would like?

As the other commenter pointed out, .lan is not officially sanctioned for local use, but it is not used publicly and is a common choice. However you could use whatever you want.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

use the official home.arpa as specified in RFC 8375

[-] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

No thanks. I get some people agreed to this, but I'm going to continue to use .lan, like so many others. If they ever register .lan for public use, there will be a lot of people pissed off.

IMO, the only reason not to assign a top-level domain in the RFC is so that some company can make money on it. The authors were from Cisco and Nominum, a DNS company purchased by Akamai, but that doesnt appear to be the reason why. .home and .homenet were proposed, but this is from the mailing list:

  1. we cannot be sure that using .home is consistent with the existing (ab)use
  2. ICANN is in receipt of about a dozen applications for ".home", and some of those applicants no doubt have deeper pockets than the IETF does should they decide to litigate

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/homenet/PWl6CANKKAeeMs1kgBP5YPtiCWg/

So, corporate fear.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

But home.arpa’s top-level domain is .arpa?

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

I'm not sure I follow the question. All of the TLD *.arpa is not reserved for private use, only *.home.arpa. So all your internal services are required to be a sub domain.

[-] [email protected] 15 points 3 days ago

Its like self signed certs with the convience of a third party

[-] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Maybe kinda, but it's also a third party whose certificates are almost if not entirely universally trusted. Self-signed certs cause software to complain unless you also spread a root certificate to be trusted to any machine that might use one of your self-signed certs.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago

Would this work with a public dynamic DNS?

[-] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago

With dynamic DNS? Yeah it always has, as long as you can host a http server.

With a dynamic IP? It should do, the certs are only valid for 6 days for that reason.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

I never understood why we don't use IP certificates to encrypt the domain with SNI.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago
[-] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

In much simpler terms:

Think of an IP address like a street address. 192 My Street.

There might be multiple businesses at one street address. In real life we address them with things like 1/192 My Street and 2/192 My Street, but there's no direct parallel to that in computer networks. Instead, what we do is more like directing your letter to say "Business A c/o 192 My Street". That's what SNI does.

Because we have to write all of that on the outside of the envelope, everyone gets to see that we're communicating with Business A. But what if one of the businesses at 192 My Street is highly sensitive and we'd rather people didn't know we were communicating with them? @bjoern_[email protected]'s proposal is basically like if you put the "Business A" part inside the envelope, so the mailman (and anyone who sees the letter on the way) only see that it's going to 192 My Street. Then the front room at that address could open the envelope and see that the ultimate destination is Business A, and pass it along to them.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

There's Encrypted Client Hello, supported by major browsers that does the SNI encryption. It's starting to be fairly widely supported.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

192 My Street

Except that with street addresses there is such a lack of inconsistency on how they work and are written that it is funny

[-] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

Currently before establishing an encrypted connection to a webserver the domain is sent to the webserver unencrypted so that the server can choose the appropriate certificate to use for encryption. That is called SNI, Server Name Indication.

Of course that's a privacy risk. There are finally protocols to fix this but they aren't very widespread and depend on DNS over HTTPS.

I think issuing certificates based on the IP and sending the domain name encrypted based on that certificate could have fixed this issue ages ago.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago
load more comments
view more: next ›
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
476 points (99.2% liked)

Selfhosted

49269 readers
710 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS