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by mattowen_uk 3270 days ago
Specifically... LetsEncrypt, and most other CAs no longer issue certs for domains that are not legal ccTLDs or gTLDs.

Not so many years ago, Microsoft recommended that organisations used [companyname].local as their internal DNS zone[1], as .local will never be an external zone, so there would be no conflict. Then along came cloud integration and increased need for edge services, and .local no worked well as a solution. Servers needed certs with both the local domain and a new external domain in their certs which became a security nightmare. Then (about a year ago) CAs stopped issuing certs for domains that weren't sub-domains of proper TLDs, which all but killed the concept of these internal non-legal domains.

So, unless you are prepared to roll your own CA, AND instruct your internal (non MS-domain members) users how to manually install an untrusted cert, signing internal sites that do not have a legal domain name, is a complete non-starter.

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[1] Now of course they recommend a sub-domain of your public domain name (site1.company.com), or a reserved public domain name that you don't use externally (site1-company.com). Which is all well and good, but what about the 100s of legacy kit you've got on the old name... ~sigh~