[pgroves]

Another nuisance is that unencrypted port 80 must be open to the outside world to do the acme negotiation (LE servers must be able to talk to your acme client running at the subdomain that wants a cert). They also intentionally don't publish a list of IPs that LetsEncrypt might be coming from [1]. So opening firewall ports on machines that are specifically internal hosts has to be a part of any renewal scripts that run every X days. Kinda sucks IMO.

[1]https://letsencrypt.org/docs/faq/#what-ip-addresses-does-let...

UPDATE: Apparently there is a DNS based solution that I wasn't aware of.

[nybble41]

As these are internal hostnames, you're probably doing a DNS-01 challenge rather than HTTP-01. With DNS-01 you don't need to open up any ports for incoming HTTP connections; you just need to place a TXT record in the DNS for the domain.

[wielebny]

That's not true. You can validate domains using dns-01, without exposing hosts.

[detaro]

and even with HTTP challenge you don't have to expose the host directly, but e.g. can copy the challenge response to a public webserver from the internal host or from a coordinator server.

[rad_gruchalski]

But it is possible to have initial certificates without opening anything: https://gruchalski.com/posts/2021-06-04-letsencrypt-certific...

From there, it’s possible to use HTTPS negotiation.

[pgroves]

This looks kind of interesting. I might try this. Thanks.

[duskwuff]

Only true if you're using HTTP validation. Use DNS validation instead and this isn't an issue.

[pgroves]

Fair enough. Although that seems rather complicated for those of us just trying to get a quick cert for an internal host. The LetsEncrypt forums are full of this discussion:

[1] https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/whitelisting-le-ip-addre... [2] https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/whitelist-hostnames-for-... [3]https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/letsencrypt-ip-addresses...