this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
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Who benefits from this? Even though Let’s Encrypt stresses that most site operators will do fine sticking with ordinary domain certificates, there are still scenarios where a numeric identifier is the only practical choice:

Infrastructure services such as DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) – where clients may pin a literal IP address for performance or censorship-evasion reasons.
IoT and home-lab devices – think network-attached storage boxes, for example, living behind static WAN addresses.
Ephemeral cloud workloads – short-lived back-end servers that spin up with public IPs faster than DNS records can propagate.
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I would read layman discussions about why this (by context?) is good.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Domains need to be registered annually and DNS servers are needed to route traffic to them. But using an IP directly, you don't need to worry about domain registration issues that can brick your systems, and you don't have to worry about DNS providers knowing about your traffic (or maintaining your own private dns).

If it's not a user trying in a memorable domain, an IP serves much better.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

This could go a long way towards fighting online censorship. One less issue when an authoritarian overreach gets your domain seized. Pretty awesome.

[–] [email protected] 117 points 2 days ago (5 children)

Can I get a cert for 127.0.0.1 ? /s

[–] [email protected] 101 points 2 days ago (2 children)

How many bits is a /s mask?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Is that the same i as the squareroot of -1?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

This would actually be useful for local testing of software during development.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 2 days ago (3 children)

The down votes are from people who work in IT support that have to deal with idiots that play with things they dont understand.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 days ago (2 children)

It’s unfortunate they don’t know what /s means

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

It obviously means "secure"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

We do, it's just that those users will also often go "nah, I'm just joking!" then do some shit anyways.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

How do I setup a reverse proxy for pure TCP? /s

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago

Think that's called NATing

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

You can based on the port.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

nah, I was once an idiot who didn't understand so idgaf

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Yeah, the unfortunate part about internet security is that everyone has to start somewhere. And that means there’s always a newbie making dumb mistakes that they don’t even realize are dumb. It’s not a personal failing, unless they fail to learn from it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

If you can get their servers to connect to that IP under your control, you've earned it

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

Is /s more or less IPs than /24? I need lots of IPs in case I want to expand

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago (1 children)

F I N A L L Y

Now tell me it supports IPv6 and I'll be the happiest man alive

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Maybe I'm not understanding it but I can't see what I would use this for due to the 6 day issue period. Bringing a NAS up to copy data for a couple days is the only real use case I find for home users.

Because even if you pay for a static external IP from your ISP, this doesn't support using such for longer than that period right?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Let's Encrypt is meant yo be used with automated certificate renewal using the ACME protocol. There are many clients for this. Both standalone and built into e.g. Caddy, Traefik and other software that does SSL termination.

So this specific concern doesn't really make sense. But that doesn't mean I really see a use case for it either, since it usually makes more sense to access resources via a host name.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Thanks! I'll look into that, this could be useful for me then after all. This is why it's always good to ask questions

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Can't it automatically be renewed?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Not sure, I just saw the 6 day thing in the article, that would be nice though

Edit: vorpal says you should be able to using ACME https://programming.dev/comment/17987211

[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 days ago (3 children)

That's kind of awesome! I have a bunch of home lab stuff, but have been putting off buying a domain (I was a broke college student when I started my lab and half the point was avoiding recurring costs- plus I already run the DNS, as far as the WAN is concerned, I have whatever domain I want). My loose plan was to stand up a certificate authority and push the root public key out with active directory, but being able to certify things against Let's Encrypt might make things significantly easier.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 days ago (1 children)

FYI you can get a numeric xyz domain for 1$ a year

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

At least for the first year.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Pretty sure it remains $1. But it's specifically only 6-9 digit numeric .xyz domains.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Setting up a root and a immediate CA is significantly more fun though ;) It's also teaches you more about PKI which is a good skill to have.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I use a domain, but for homelab I eventually switched to my own internal CA.

Instead of having to do service.domain.tld it's nice to do service.lan.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Any good instructions you would recommend for doing this?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

I just use openssl"s built in management. I have scripts that set it up and generate a .lan domain, and instructions for adding it to clients. I could make a repo and writeup if you would like?

As the other commenter pointed out, .lan is not officially sanctioned for local use, but it is not used publicly and is a common choice. However you could use whatever you want.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

use the official home.arpa as specified in RFC 8375

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

No thanks. I get some people agreed to this, but I'm going to continue to use .lan, like so many others. If they ever register .lan for public use, there will be a lot of people pissed off.

IMO, the only reason not to assign a top-level domain in the RFC is so that some company can make money on it. The authors were from Cisco and Nominum, a DNS company purchased by Akamai, but that doesnt appear to be the reason why. .home and .homenet were proposed, but this is from the mailing list:

  1. we cannot be sure that using .home is consistent with the existing (ab)use
  2. ICANN is in receipt of about a dozen applications for ".home", and some of those applicants no doubt have deeper pockets than the IETF does should they decide to litigate

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/homenet/PWl6CANKKAeeMs1kgBP5YPtiCWg/

So, corporate fear.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

But home.arpa’s top-level domain is .arpa?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 16 hours ago

I'm not sure I follow the question. All of the TLD *.arpa is not reserved for private use, only *.home.arpa. So all your internal services are required to be a sub domain.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Its like self signed certs with the convience of a third party

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

Maybe kinda, but it's also a third party whose certificates are almost if not entirely universally trusted. Self-signed certs cause software to complain unless you also spread a root certificate to be trusted to any machine that might use one of your self-signed certs.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Would this work with a public dynamic DNS?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago

With dynamic DNS? Yeah it always has, as long as you can host a http server.

With a dynamic IP? It should do, the certs are only valid for 6 days for that reason.

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