Hello everyone. Need some opinions here. Does it worth all the trouble to make things like jellyfin and immich run with HTTPS for services that are only accesible in the LAN? I ask it 'cause, as far as I know, there is no way to put a valid certificate like let’s encrypt for a service that is not accessible from the net and I don’t plan to buy a certificate for myself. But I have some trouble with the rest of my family having issue with their browsers complaining about the lack of https every time a browser is updated. So, what would be the best solution?
I do DNS challenges with let’s encrypt for either host fqnds (for my kubes cluster) or wildcard for the few other services.
The trick is to do a subdomain off of a domain that you own (e.g.
thing.lan.mydomain.com) this way, you can scope the DNS to only*.lan.mydomain.comif you’re conscious about scoped api security.Using let’s encrypt is nice because you can have a valid ssl chain that android, iOS, windows, and Linux all trust with their default trusts without having to do something with a custom CA (ask me how awful that process can be).
Wildcard is actually good these days because you don’t have to set up DNS entries for your hostnames.
It’s not security, just obscurity - but in the age of crawlers, it’s helpful.
Also, you can use it internally for services on LAN and because LetsEncrypt is a CA everyone trusts, you don’t need to register a local CA (like a FreeIPA instance) with all your devices- which sometimes isn’t possible.
EDIT: you can also use DNS01 challenges and instead of proving yourself by serving up a challenge response from a server, you prove ownership by adding a DNS TXT entry with the response. It is safer, from a security perspective, to use one cert per service.