Converted personal web sites to TLS

I've been in favor of using TLS and encryption for as much as possible for a while, but I never wanted to pay money to the certificate cartel. I'd been using certificates from CAcert.org, but they're not recognized by most browsers, so it felt rude to redirect everything to TLS with one of their certificates.

Finally, the EFF and others put together Let's Encrypt with free, browser-recognized certificates and even a really solid automatic renewal system. That's perfect, and also eliminated my last excuse to go do the work, so now all of my personal web sites use TLS and HTTPS by default and redirect to the encrypted version of the web site. And better yet, all the certificates should just renew themselves automatically, meaning one less thing I have to keep track of and deal with periodically.

Many thanks to Wouter Verhelst for his short summary of how to get the Let's Encrypt client to work properly from the command line without doing all the other stuff it wants to do in order to make things easier for less sophisticated users. Also useful was the SSL Labs server test to make sure I got the modern TLS configuration right. (All my sites should now be an A. I decided to not cut off support for Internet Explorer older than version 11 yet.

I imported copies of the Debian packages needed for installation of the Let's Encrypt package on Debian jessie that weren't already in Debian backports into my personal Debian repository for my own convenience, but they're also there for anyone else.

Oh, that reminds me: this also affects the archives.eyrie.org APT repository (the one linked above), so if any of you were using that, you'll now need to install apt-transport-https and might want to change the URL to use HTTPS.

Posted: 2016-02-07 20:44 — Why no comments?

Last spun 2022-02-06 from thread modified 2021-08-08