Hacker News Reader

Comment by matahwoosh | Hacker News Reader

I'm assuming mrkurt meant that you send your users once to create a dns record (in case you haven't already) - you can add any hostname you want on Fly, it doesn't have to exist, yet. Then you go and create a DNS challenge for Let's Encrypt. Obviously, these 2 steps are orthogonal, but this is the reality of user onboarding.

View on HN

But why would that need to be in two steps?

Well, it's two DNS entries. You could do them both at the same time, but people were getting that TXT record wrong pretty frequently, which would have meant https connections getting an invalid certificate had they changed their actual hostname at the same time.

Since we control the http response once DNS changes, we don't have that problem. And it's simpler for people to create CNAME/ALIAS records.

Erm ... you had people create TXT records? Why would you do that? Wouldn't people then have to manually update the TXT record on each certificate renew?!

Why not have them create a DNAME, a delegation, or just two CNAMEs?

txt records are the only way to do the dns-01 challenge with certbot/Let's Encrypt.

The http-01 challenge is simpler, we can get people setup with one CNAME/A-record.

Once we're serving traffic, we can do all renewals with an http challenge and they don't need to change DNS ever again.

This is an often overlooked option, but you can indeed solve the DNS challenge by having someone create a CNAME record for _acme-challenge.example.com that points to a domain under your control, and then serve the TXT record needed to verify the challenge from that domain. acme-dns[1] provides a nice implementation of this idea, as well as a more detailed explanation.

[1]: https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns

Whoa really? I didn't know this option existed. This would make these types of configurations a lot better.

Sorry, not trying to mock you, but I'm really curious how you (or anyone else on this thread who seems to be surprised by the possibility) managed to not know.

I mean, assuming you do know that CNAMEs are a thing, this reads to me like "well, yes, HTTP can do redirects, but I didn't know you could also redirect requests for images!" ...

I guess what I am wondering is: What is/was your mental model of CNAMEs that they could redirect DNS resolution, but then it's somehow surprising that they can redirect DNS resolution!?!

I don't think we'd considered a CNAME to redirect the specific txt records that Lets Encrypt requires. It's not intuitively obvious that they support redirects for those lookups.

But how is it not?! I mean, apart from the fact that you never know whether software is buggy, of course.

CNAMEs are not a feature of application software, but rather a mandatory part of the DNS specification that any standards-compliant resolver has to implement. As they claim to be using DNS, that obviously implies the claim that they implement what the DNS specification defines, and that would necessarily include following CNAMEs.

Part of it was that I'm not very familiar with the internals of the challenges and I didn't know that `_acme-challenge` was the record name for the dns-01 challenge. (I probably could have put 2+2 together if I realized this much.)

Another part was that I've never read the dns rfc and honestly I've only ever spent enough time messing with dns until it worked. And I've never seen a CNAME for a record that's resolves to anything but A (or AAAA or another CNAME). So I suppose it was a combination of a failure of imagination, lack of knowledge, and lack of experience. Or maybe, "I dunno I never thought about it".

But now I know! CNAMEs work for all records regardless of type, forwarding the entire lookup elsewhere, which I guess is why they require no other records exist with that name. Pretty cool.

I suppose I could have learned that with a bit less incredulity but hey, it got me here in the end. I guess a link to the RFC might be relevant here [CNAME 1]. I'll probably look through it later, maybe there's some other cool features I didn't know about.

[1]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1034

You could also have them delegate the _acme-challenge with an NS record

And A and AAAA records are the only way to do HTTP with web browsers ... so?!

What makes you think that CNAME or DNAME records are specific to A or AAAA records?!

I'm really struggling to understand what you're recommending. Will you explain how a DNAME works with the Lets Encrypt auth process in a way that makes it as simple as a single CNAME/a-record?

Well, you have them create a DNAME that maps theirhostname.theirdomain to yourhostidorsomething.yourdomain, and then you have in your nameserver A and AAAA records for yourhostidorsomething.yourdomain and a TXT record for _acme-challenge.yourhostidorsomething.yourdomain!?

(Obviously doesn't work if they are to keep control over other subdomains of theirhostname.theirdomain, and also, I haven't tried it with DNAMEs, so I don't know whether their implementation is buggy.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com