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PSA: LetsEncrypt ending expiration notification emails
(letsencrypt.org)
Just use certbot and cron.
PSA: If you use Cloudflare to proxy, you can get a free decade long certificate and not worry about it for awhile.
Oh, look: the NSA dangling a carrot on a line.
Hey, if you wanna put your home server out there so the first person who gets pissy at you can DDoS you off the net until your ISP decides to cancel your service, that's a perfectly acceptable decision to make for yourself.
Those emails have warned me something was pooched in advance many times. I do find them useful.
Sad to see them go, but nice they mention an alternative.
I’ve mainly gotten false positives, myself. When I’ve added another subdomain or something and the certificate gets set up differently, so then you get 2-3 emails saying domain X will expire, but if you connect to the url you see it has 80+ days left. Setting up your own monitoring solution is probably long overdue for myself, and it’s nice I’m getting forced to do it, in a way
Pretty much all monitoring solutions on the market track cert expiration nowadays. I get an alert when any of my certs have <5 days left
What monitoring solution do you use? I need to set something up for my own projects but haven't gotten around to it. Any experience with Nagios?
If you have the time to spare (a few weeks perhaps, if coming from zero) to experiment and read, Prometheus and Grafana offers a lot and can be really flexible. I use a pretty simple bash script that scrapes my desired https endpoints and writes out the results to a file Prometheus (node-exporter) understands, and from there I can write alert rules in Grafana to fire off notices by email or slack.
I set up uptime kuma to also monitor certs this week when I got the reminder email about them stopping the email warnings, been using it for some time for uptime monitoring (mostly to see if some auto docker image update screws up my services) and the notification parts has worked nicely for that, so I’m also assuming it will work nicely for the certificates
I use NewRelic myself. They are software agnostic and only connect to your URL to get the expiration date.
If you set up LE correctly, it should never get an alert. I haven't been alerted since I set it up, to the point that I wonder if I set up the monitor correctly.
The only thing I wish it could do is use custom ports. I have some services running on non standard ports.
I manage all my certs using Cert Warden which has a dashboard that displays the expiry date. It does lack alerting, so I use Uptime-kuma to monitor the expiry dates of the certs. So not a big loss for me.
I did setup UptimeKuma for notifications on this. let's see if it works out when the expiry arrives in a month
I think I'll need to add notifications for my uptime kuma as well now. So far I've used it mostly for historical data but without the mails, I would like to get a notice
UptimeKuma looks nice. Simple, but it does what it is supposed to.
Just needs an API and an export/import feature.
I think it's a good idea, everyone should be automating this anyway.
This is still not possible in all scenarios. For example, wildcard certificates for DNS providers with no API support.
Then swap you nameservers to a DNS provider that allows that?
There are a lot of embedded systems that do not offer API support to swap out certificates. Things like switches, dvr, nas devices, etc.
Honestly in rare situations that a device like that needs to be accessible from the wild Internet I think it'd be mad to expose it directly, especially if it's not manageable as you suggest. At the very least, I'd be leaning on a reverse proxy.
That implies though I don’t want valid certificates in my environment. I still want to make sure even on my private network I’m using valid certs. A lot of security departments require that too even if the device isn’t public facing.
Valid certificate is anything you trust. Any CA which you can trust is no more or less secure than the one you get from LE, so for the private network you can just happily sign your own certificates and just distribute the CA to your devices.
But then you have to distribute CAs to all the devices that will reach this service, and not all devices allow that.
True. And there's also a ton of devices around which don't trust LetsEncrypt either. There's always edge cases. For example, take a bit older photocopier and it's more than likely that it doesn't trust on anything on this planet anymore and there's no easy way to update CA lists even if the hardware itself is still perfectly functional.
That doesn't mean that your self-signed CA, in itself, would be technically any less secure than the most expensive Verisign certificate you can find. And yes, there's a ton of details and nuances here and there, but I'm not going to go trough every technical detail about how certificates work. I'm not an expert on that field by any stretch even if I do know a thing or two and there's plenty of material online to dig deep into the topic if you want to.
I'm good. I know very well there are uses cases for a self signed cert. LE is still far more practical for 99% of use cases, even internally.
still want to make sure even on my private network I’m using valid certs. A lot of security departments require that too even if the device isn’t public facing.
Is there a hard source with evidence that this is at all needed? Because there are a lot of things that "security departments" do that amount to security theater. Like forcing arbitrary password changes org wide.
Regardless of “hard evidence” it’s still the company policy. How well does it go over if you try to say “well acktuslly…” when it comes to password changes.
How well does it go over if you try to say “well acktuslly…” when it comes to password changes.
Well, it went over easy, but I also gained the authority to implement or toss such policies when I took my job LMAO
In any case, I was referring to the "my environment" part since it implied you had such authority and were just choosing to emulate policies of others, ofc I don't mean to make decisions you don't have the authority to. Hard evidence is hard evidence though, it does give you a leg to stand on should you propose such changes
I'm with you, but that's why I'm automating certificate expiry checking somewhere else (in my home assistant install to be exact).
How are those devices affected by having no notification anymore? The manual labor exists anyway.
Most network switches and devices have a web gui to switch them out. Those can be automated.
If you're using Prometheus, Blackbox exporter checks cert expiration as well
I have my home assistant check and also my nagios, better safe then sorry
Mine just auto renews anyway
I think thats the case for most of us. But for some like myself, it does mean I have to do the monitoring myself now. I can't complain it was a free service. But it did warn me about a renewal problem before the cert expired, so it was a useful service for me.
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2025
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