I would read layman discussions about why this (by context?) is good.
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
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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.
This could go a long way towards fighting online censorship. One less issue when an authoritarian overreach gets your domain seized. Pretty awesome.
Can I get a cert for 127.0.0.1 ? /s
How many bits is a /s mask?
i
Is that the same i as the squareroot of -1?
8
This would actually be useful for local testing of software during development.
The down votes are from people who work in IT support that have to deal with idiots that play with things they dont understand.
It’s unfortunate they don’t know what /s means
It obviously means "secure"
We do, it's just that those users will also often go "nah, I'm just joking!" then do some shit anyways.
How do I setup a reverse proxy for pure TCP? /s
Think that's called NATing
You can based on the port.
nah, I was once an idiot who didn't understand so idgaf
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.
If you can get their servers to connect to that IP under your control, you've earned it
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Is /s more or less IPs than /24? I need lots of IPs in case I want to expand
F I N A L L Y
Now tell me it supports IPv6 and I'll be the happiest man alive
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?
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.
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
Can't it automatically be renewed?
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
Yay!
Yay!
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.
FYI you can get a numeric xyz domain for 1$ a year
At least for the first year.
Pretty sure it remains $1. But it's specifically only 6-9 digit numeric .xyz domains.
nice
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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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.
Any good instructions you would recommend for doing this?
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.
use the official home.arpa as specified in RFC 8375
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:
- we cannot be sure that using .home is consistent with the existing (ab)use
- 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.
But home.arpa’s top-level domain is .arpa?
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.
Its like self signed certs with the convience of a third party
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.
Would this work with a public dynamic DNS?
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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