Show HN: Free Certificate Monitoring via RSS(raphting.dev) |
Show HN: Free Certificate Monitoring via RSS(raphting.dev) |
* - https://github.com/cloin/cloin.eda/blob/main/docs/rss.rst
Recently my Synology NAS failed to automatically renew its Let's Encrypt certificate for my domain name and the certificate expired on my blog. I caught it the next day when my GoAccess metrics cratered (took some time to figure out since I normally use the QuickConnect domain name myself, whose certificate was fine), but it could've stayed broken for a very long time otherwise without me noticing.
You got yourself a subscriber.
That's totally on me for missing it. On the other hand I only follow a couple of RSS feeds, so it's a notification channel with a far higher signal-to-noise ratio for me.
Even though the renewal app runs as a cron job weekly, it occasionally breaks due to OS updates or some other issue so the email from Lets encrypt that warns me at least a week or before the expiration has been fantastic.
I did take some very basic precautions otherwise (its firewall is configured to drop all non-local packets but for TCP ports 80 and 443), but at some point I'll have to host my blog properly instead of piggy-backing on a dinky, always-on NAS...
This is what I use for my monitoring solutions
What about soft failures, like connection problems? What if the cert is available but actually garbage? What if between 30 and 7 days the cert is changed?
And no, not checking FQDN against SAN is...
And finally, who monitors the monitoring?
I have to submit a change request to get this added to our monitoring platform, and this is just so much simpler.
Thank you!
And perhaps also specifying a port, for services not on 443?
I also have monitoring that alerts me if a cert is nearing expiry.
I’ve been alerted several times and been able to correct bugs or hiccups that would have caused the live cert to expire.
Automation is not a replacement for monitoring: they are complementary.
absolutely. there are any number of reasons Caddy would be unable to renew the cert, just off the top of my head:
- LetsEncrypt has downtime or unavailability
- If you're doing dns-01 challenges for LE, whatever cred Caddy uses for that might expire / become invalidated.
- disk fills up (or gets unexpectedly remounted read-only) and Caddy is unable to write the renewed certs
Browsers today no longer provide visual indicators for EV certificates [1] so I don’t know if they’re still in common use.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Validation_Certificat... "Removal of special UI indicators"
Not really.
> [...] I don’t know if they’re still in common use.
They are. The myth that they are somehow inherently more secure is still widespread.
This is a double negative. Depending on how you interpret the comma, it could mean "guarantees are given for everything." (Pointing this out in case you intend to protect yourself from liability with this statement.)