Certain use cases preclude DNS dynamic updates to a zone for technical, policy or other reasons. This post explains a simple way to enable automatic DNS-based authorization for Let’s Encrypt certificates – and perhaps for other vendors’ – by way of delegating the authorization challenge to a trusted DNS zone.
Let’s Encrypt and Certbot can provide wildcard certificates when the validation process is carried out via DNS. This post explains my setup and introduces some new scripts I’ve uploaded to make this task easier.
I manage my own DNS servers for my personal projects and some of the causes I support. This gives me absolute control over the operation. Recently I decided to return to a 100% dynamically updated setup – where records can be added securely and in real time from anywhere. This post includes some notes on how to do this easily.
Most of the applications I work with involve storing, transforming and querying data from relational databases. Over the years I’ve developed a pattern to manage those changes that has proven to be helpful, involving a minimum of universally available tools. This post introduces this pattern in the hopes that it becomes useful for others.
Mocking is a useful testing strategy but the type system in Go can get in the way. In this post I briefly discuss an easy to follow pattern to ease mocking when writing tests.
This is an updated shopping list for the quads I’ve built for my 2018 flying season. It’s based on lessons learned during 2017, and I’ll be discussing the results and reasoning behind each part. Hopefully you’ll find this useful if you’re building a new quad or three and want to save some money.
Implementing TLSA or HPKP for certificate pinning while using automated certificate authorities such as Let’s Encrypt can be tricky. These notes explain how I do it on my servers, using GnuTLS to do the heavylifting.
This post collects some of my notes in quickly configuring sets of domain names for DNSSEC using BIND9. There are many in-depth tutorials on setting up DNSSEC, so this is just my notes on how I deal with groups of tens to hundreds of domains at a time.
This post discusses various additions in your website configuration that help protect your visitors from various forms of attack. While not really a requirement for most personal sites such as this, hopefully the discussion below will be of help to people in charge of more sensitive sites.
Managing multiple sets of certificates with Let’s Encrypt and Certbot does not have to be complicated. This post contains some of my notes about managing servers with Nginx, Sendmail and Dovecot along with Let’s Encrypt certificates.