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The concerns about Caddy handling an ACME server outage are not really well founded these days, because: 1) Caddy has the most robust OCSP implementation of an

by mholt 9y ago

The concerns about Caddy handling an ACME server outage are not really well founded these days, because: 1) Caddy has the most robust OCSP implementation of any web server. It caches staples locally and refreshes them halfway through the validity period so it can endure days-long OCSP responder outages. 2) Even if a certificate needs to be renewed while the ACME server is down, Caddy can endure 2-to-3-week-long outages of the ACME server because it renews 30 days out from expiration and tries twice per day until it succeeds, logging its actions along the way. And because Caddy is written in Go, memory leaks like what Apache suffers are much less likely, if not impossible. (Source: I implemented it.)

stephenr 9y ago
> 1)... Two calls to OpenSSL and a few lines of shell script will fetch staples from LE whenever I want (ie more often than your defaults that have caused problems before) for HAProxy to serve. How's that for robust. >2)... great so you're as reliable as.. any other LE client that tries to renew before expiry, but without the ability to choose when to renew certs?
- mholt 9y ago
  1) Caddy has never had OCSP outage problems. When LE's OCSP responders went down for a day a few months ago, Caddy was the ONLY server that kept sites online (unless nginx was explicitly configured for it; almost all Apache sites with it went down, including gnu.org). 2) Ours is the only LE client built directly into the web server, so "reliability" isn't really a comparable factor. By doing renewals automatically, Caddy's HTTPS implementation is more reliable and robust than doing it manually.
  - stephenr 9y ago
    > 1) Ok fine, you want to pretend HAProxy isn't a thing that exists, we can do that. > 2) That isn't necessarily a good thing. Have you ever heard of separation of concerns? You specifically mentioned how Caddy can manage 2-3 week outages, as if it's something unique to your software. Every LE client that can be run from cron/a systemd timer renews certificates autagically. So where's the manual part that you keep claiming is not "robust"?
    - pfg 9y ago
      As someone who occasionally helps people with their web server/TLS/Let's Encrypt configuration, my experience is that there is a world of difference between a web server merely giving you the tools you'd need for a (relatively) sane OCSP and auto-renewal configuration, and one that takes care of everything. You should not need the amount of specialized knowledge you currently need to correctly configure OCSP on HAProxy or nginx, for example. Failure to renew a certificate (for any number of reasons) and missing intermediate certificates are the most common issues, and both of these are essentially solved with a web server that supports ACME natively. The same applies to OCSP stapling - we're not going to achieve ubiquitous stapling support on the server side if every server admin needs to deploy a bash script calling to openssl because the native OCSP implementation in their web server is broken.
      - stephenr 9y ago
        There is literally zero configuration required for HAProxy. You just store .ocsp files alongside the .pem's Yes you need to fetch them regularly. I use the aforementioned shell script to do this. Why do you people keep up this weird narrative that only caddy renews certificates automatically? The native ocsp handling in HAProxy isn't broken: it just expects to have TLS material provided to it. If someone setting up HAProxy on a server can't install a shell script calling two OpenSSL commands and setup cron to call it regularly, I don't think your big problem is "HAProxy doesn't handle ocsp". It's PEBKAC.
        pfg 9y ago
        > There is literally zero configuration required for HAProxy. You just store .ocsp files alongside the .pem's > Yes you need to fetch them regularly. I use the aforementioned shell script to do this. It does sound like there's some configuration involved after all, namely the configuration of a cronjob, and perhaps adjustments to a bash script. This is something that the majority of server operators will not bother with, though these numbers might look slightly better for HAProxy since that's generally something you see used by more experienced sysadmins. Even with nginx, we're talking about one line of configuration for the actual stapling file - that's not the blocker, it should just work, by default. Fun fact: IIS does this. > Why do you people keep up this weird narrative that only caddy renews certificates automatically? I'm not sure who "you people" are, and I never made any such claim. What I'm saying is that web servers that support ACME natively leave a lot less room for the types of misconfigurations that I commonly see. I'm aware of an ACME module for apache and lua scripts for nginx which provide similar features (regarding renewal and certificates, not for the OCSP aspect), but they're not part of what you run by default when you use those web servers. > The native ocsp handling in HAProxy isn't broken: it just expects to have TLS material provided to it. I have yet to see you explain why this should be necessary. The web server has all the information it needs to do this. Other web servers can do this. > If someone setting up HAProxy on a server can't install a shell script calling two OpenSSL commands and setup cron to call it regularly, I don't think your big problem is "HAProxy doesn't handle ocsp". It's PEBKAC. This is like arguing MongoDB should continue to bind to all interfaces by default because everyone should have firewalls in place. Yes, they should, but it's never going to happen, so why can't we just have a safe default?
  - jimjag 9y ago
    re: "only LE client". https://github.com/icing/mod_md https://github.com/icing/mod_md this is being folded into the official Apache httpd repo.

by mholt 9y ago

stephenr 9y ago

> 1)... Two calls to OpenSSL and a few lines of shell script will fetch staples from LE whenever I want (ie more often than your defaults that have caused problems before) for HAProxy to serve. How's that for robust. >2)... great so you're as reliable as.. any other LE client that tries to renew before expiry, but without the ability to choose when to renew certs?

mholt 9y ago
1) Caddy has never had OCSP outage problems. When LE's OCSP responders went down for a day a few months ago, Caddy was the ONLY server that kept sites online (unless nginx was explicitly configured for it; almost all Apache sites with it went down, including gnu.org). 2) Ours is the only LE client built directly into the web server, so "reliability" isn't really a comparable factor. By doing renewals automatically, Caddy's HTTPS implementation is more reliable and robust than doing it manually.
- stephenr 9y ago
  > 1) Ok fine, you want to pretend HAProxy isn't a thing that exists, we can do that. > 2) That isn't necessarily a good thing. Have you ever heard of separation of concerns? You specifically mentioned how Caddy can manage 2-3 week outages, as if it's something unique to your software. Every LE client that can be run from cron/a systemd timer renews certificates autagically. So where's the manual part that you keep claiming is not "robust"?
  - pfg 9y ago
    As someone who occasionally helps people with their web server/TLS/Let's Encrypt configuration, my experience is that there is a world of difference between a web server merely giving you the tools you'd need for a (relatively) sane OCSP and auto-renewal configuration, and one that takes care of everything. You should not need the amount of specialized knowledge you currently need to correctly configure OCSP on HAProxy or nginx, for example. Failure to renew a certificate (for any number of reasons) and missing intermediate certificates are the most common issues, and both of these are essentially solved with a web server that supports ACME natively. The same applies to OCSP stapling - we're not going to achieve ubiquitous stapling support on the server side if every server admin needs to deploy a bash script calling to openssl because the native OCSP implementation in their web server is broken.
    - stephenr 9y ago
      There is literally zero configuration required for HAProxy. You just store .ocsp files alongside the .pem's Yes you need to fetch them regularly. I use the aforementioned shell script to do this. Why do you people keep up this weird narrative that only caddy renews certificates automatically? The native ocsp handling in HAProxy isn't broken: it just expects to have TLS material provided to it. If someone setting up HAProxy on a server can't install a shell script calling two OpenSSL commands and setup cron to call it regularly, I don't think your big problem is "HAProxy doesn't handle ocsp". It's PEBKAC.
      - pfg 9y ago
        > There is literally zero configuration required for HAProxy. You just store .ocsp files alongside the .pem's > Yes you need to fetch them regularly. I use the aforementioned shell script to do this. It does sound like there's some configuration involved after all, namely the configuration of a cronjob, and perhaps adjustments to a bash script. This is something that the majority of server operators will not bother with, though these numbers might look slightly better for HAProxy since that's generally something you see used by more experienced sysadmins. Even with nginx, we're talking about one line of configuration for the actual stapling file - that's not the blocker, it should just work, by default. Fun fact: IIS does this. > Why do you people keep up this weird narrative that only caddy renews certificates automatically? I'm not sure who "you people" are, and I never made any such claim. What I'm saying is that web servers that support ACME natively leave a lot less room for the types of misconfigurations that I commonly see. I'm aware of an ACME module for apache and lua scripts for nginx which provide similar features (regarding renewal and certificates, not for the OCSP aspect), but they're not part of what you run by default when you use those web servers. > The native ocsp handling in HAProxy isn't broken: it just expects to have TLS material provided to it. I have yet to see you explain why this should be necessary. The web server has all the information it needs to do this. Other web servers can do this. > If someone setting up HAProxy on a server can't install a shell script calling two OpenSSL commands and setup cron to call it regularly, I don't think your big problem is "HAProxy doesn't handle ocsp". It's PEBKAC. This is like arguing MongoDB should continue to bind to all interfaces by default because everyone should have firewalls in place. Yes, they should, but it's never going to happen, so why can't we just have a safe default?
- jimjag 9y ago
  re: "only LE client". https://github.com/icing/mod_md https://github.com/icing/mod_md this is being folded into the official Apache httpd repo.