I spent most of today learning about certs and CAs.
Wikipedia helped out a bit here.
I just woke up this morning and said to myself.. “Man, I wonder how certs work. I used to know, or thought I understood, but I just don’t get it anymore”
After I spent some time learning about certs I also contemplated obtaining some of my own signed by a root CA.
I could get one from one of the big companies and spend tons of money, but I decided to go the free route. The only problem with self signed certs is that everyone gets prompted to accept the validity of the cert since there was no trusted third party to say “yeah, this guy’s shit is cool. no worries”
Well I found a site StartCom based out of Israel that will sign certs for free. This wouldn’t be anything too special since I could do this myself.. BUT StartCom is added by default in the latest releases of Firefox as a trusted CA.
This means when you use Firefox to go to https://bbbburns.com you won’t be prompted. I find this awesome and better than signing my own certs. For just a small amount you can use their next level of service which allows you * wildcard certs. I’m still debating this one as it would make my life a lot easier for getting a cert for both my web server “bbbbburns.com” and my mail server “stewie.bbbburns.com” with the same cert. Or I could just go through the process of getting a cert for each.. /shrug
Not that I even NEED certs for my stuff as I’m usually the only one accessing it over a local LAN. It’s more of a mental exercise really.
The next step is to get my imaps up and running with a CA signed cert.
Msg me of you want your own @bbbburns.com email address.
I’ve got to migrate my qmail server to something else in the near future anyway so I’ll also probably be setting up addresses for
@bbbburns.com
@fuckweresmart.com
@nothingappropriate.com
I’d like to use burns@fuckweresmart for all of my work email. I think that would be a good time. Don’t you?