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I think there are people who care about just about everything. Let's make those certificates expire every month. Also without a way to say it without riskin

I think there are people who care about just about everything. Let's make those certificates expire every month. Also without a way to say it without risking offending someone: the tinfoil hat brigade can make everything grind to a halt. People can have concerns, and they can be very invested in those concerns, but they can be so concerned that I don't know if I could ever satisfy them. They could be concerned about what operating system that HTTPS-serving software runs on, and their set of requirements might be such that I cannot run anything.

kerkeslager 6y ago
> I think there are people who care about just about everything. True. But I'm not one of those people. You'll note that there are a few of your examples which I haven't objected to. That's because I don't have objections to all of your examples. > Let's make those certificates expire every month. I get your point--people do ask for excessive security measures sometimes. But as an aside, the point of frequent certificate expiration has nothing to do with security. It's to encourage automation of renewals.
- at_a_remove 6y ago
  And with that dreadful menuing system I described above, there was no way to automate that. I had even considered using Expect! So the encouragement has resulted in a detriment to me: more work. Oh, for a little choice! But the one-size-fits-all parade marches onward.
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    Yeah it is more work. If you're a sysadmin, that is your job and it's why you get paid. You're welcome to choose another job if it's too much work for you.
    - at_a_remove 6y ago
      Yes, it is more work. And doing it doing it once every month instead of once a year is yet more work. But is it valuable work? Does that work accomplish anything? Or is that effort wasted when I could have been doing other things? I was not a sysadmin -- I kept trying to avoid that, but got sucked in, as a programmer (my title), with the reasoning I have been doing "web stuff" for a long time, as well as the sysadmin duties that were required for setting up websites "back in the day." I could have been programming and solving real problems on a more permanent basis, but here I am, carrying water with a hole in the bottom of the bucket. Once the DevOps wand got waved, I got out. If people are truly concerned about security, even the much-disliked sysadmin duties foisted upon me could have had the time more wisely spent then flipping certs around.
      - kerkeslager 6y ago
        1. I am extremely skeptical of your claim that cert renewals couldn't be automated. 2. Nobody here is saying that you need to renew your certs every month. Just because some completely different person asked for something that didn't provide any value, doesn't prove that what anyone here is saying is incorrect.
        at_a_remove 6y ago
        Okay, be skeptical. I didn't want to void our support contract over finding out. Would you come to my rescue if I did? First the certs need to be renewed every three years. And some browsers want to raise warnings if they're past a year old. And Let's Encrypt is down to three months. Just waiting for the next click of the ratchet.
        kerkeslager 6y ago
        > Okay, be skeptical. I didn't want to void our support contract over finding out. Really? Your support contract would be voided if you automated certificate renewal? If what you're saying is true, the problem isn't with short renewal times, it's with your absurd support contract. Automatic renewal is the industry standard at this point. If anything, your support contract should be voided if an error occurs because you failed to automate this. I suppose it's possible that your support contract is that absurd, but given it sounds like you didn't even check, it seems a lot more likely that you don't know how to automate it and refuse to learn. You don't get to critique Let's Encrypt, a system built with automatic renewal as a fundamental component, if you refuse to use the very simple to use tools[1] they provide for automatic renewal. Maybe it's the support contract's fault, maybe it's your fault, but it's definitely not LetsEncrypt's fault that you're stuck in 2010 through incompetence or bad contract negotiation. You could spend literally 5 minutes per server and never have this problem again. [1] https://certbot.eff.org/ https://certbot.eff.org/

kerkeslager 6y ago

> I think there are people who care about just about everything. True. But I'm not one of those people. You'll note that there are a few of your examples which I haven't objected to. That's because I don't have objections to all of your examples. > Let's make those certificates expire every month. I get your point--people do ask for excessive security measures sometimes. But as an aside, the point of frequent certificate expiration has nothing to do with security. It's to encourage automation of renewals.

at_a_remove 6y ago
And with that dreadful menuing system I described above, there was no way to automate that. I had even considered using Expect! So the encouragement has resulted in a detriment to me: more work. Oh, for a little choice! But the one-size-fits-all parade marches onward.
- cycloptic 6y ago
  Yeah it is more work. If you're a sysadmin, that is your job and it's why you get paid. You're welcome to choose another job if it's too much work for you.
  - at_a_remove 6y ago
    Yes, it is more work. And doing it doing it once every month instead of once a year is yet more work. But is it valuable work? Does that work accomplish anything? Or is that effort wasted when I could have been doing other things? I was not a sysadmin -- I kept trying to avoid that, but got sucked in, as a programmer (my title), with the reasoning I have been doing "web stuff" for a long time, as well as the sysadmin duties that were required for setting up websites "back in the day." I could have been programming and solving real problems on a more permanent basis, but here I am, carrying water with a hole in the bottom of the bucket. Once the DevOps wand got waved, I got out. If people are truly concerned about security, even the much-disliked sysadmin duties foisted upon me could have had the time more wisely spent then flipping certs around.
    - kerkeslager 6y ago
      1. I am extremely skeptical of your claim that cert renewals couldn't be automated. 2. Nobody here is saying that you need to renew your certs every month. Just because some completely different person asked for something that didn't provide any value, doesn't prove that what anyone here is saying is incorrect.
      - at_a_remove 6y ago
        Okay, be skeptical. I didn't want to void our support contract over finding out. Would you come to my rescue if I did? First the certs need to be renewed every three years. And some browsers want to raise warnings if they're past a year old. And Let's Encrypt is down to three months. Just waiting for the next click of the ratchet.
        kerkeslager 6y ago
        > Okay, be skeptical. I didn't want to void our support contract over finding out. Really? Your support contract would be voided if you automated certificate renewal? If what you're saying is true, the problem isn't with short renewal times, it's with your absurd support contract. Automatic renewal is the industry standard at this point. If anything, your support contract should be voided if an error occurs because you failed to automate this. I suppose it's possible that your support contract is that absurd, but given it sounds like you didn't even check, it seems a lot more likely that you don't know how to automate it and refuse to learn. You don't get to critique Let's Encrypt, a system built with automatic renewal as a fundamental component, if you refuse to use the very simple to use tools[1] they provide for automatic renewal. Maybe it's the support contract's fault, maybe it's your fault, but it's definitely not LetsEncrypt's fault that you're stuck in 2010 through incompetence or bad contract negotiation. You could spend literally 5 minutes per server and never have this problem again. [1] https://certbot.eff.org/ https://certbot.eff.org/