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.INTERNAL is now reserved for private-use applications

(www.icann.org)
563 points joncfoo | 1 comments | 09 Aug 24 16:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.228s | source
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8organicbits ◴[09 Aug 24 22:03 UTC] No.41205729[source]▶
My biggest frustration with .internal is that it requires a private certificate authority. Lots of organizations struggle to fully set up trust for the private CA on all internal systems. When you add BYOD or contractor systems, it's a mess.

Using a publicly valid domain offers a number of benefits, like being able to use a free public CA like Lets Encrypt. Every machine will trust your internal certificates out of the box, so there is minimal toil.

Last year I built getlocalcert [1] as a free way to automate this approach. It allows you to register a subdomain, publish TXT records for ACME DNS certificate validation, and use your own internal DNS server for all private use.

[1] https://www.getlocalcert.net/

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prussian ◴[10 Aug 24 02:12 UTC] No.41206828[source]▶
Just be mindful that any certs you issue in this way will be public information[1] so make sure the domain names don't give away any interesting facts about your infrastructure or future product ideas. I did this at my last job as well and I can still see them renewing them, including an unfortunate wildcard cert which wasn't me.

[1] https://crt.sh/

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1. moontear ◴[10 Aug 24 12:11 UTC] No.41208926[source]▶
I wish there was a way to remove public information such as this. Just like historical website ownership records. Maybe interesting for research purposes, but there is so much stuff in public records I don't want everyone to have access to. Should have thought about that before creating public records - but one may not be aware of all the ramifications of e.g. just creating an SSL cert with letsencrypt or registering a random domain name without privacy extensions.