Certificate

This article explains how to set up automatic HTTPS certificates via Let’s Encrypt for services on your internal home network without opening a port on your firewall. It’s part of my series on home automation, networking & self-hosting that shows how to install, configure, and run a home server with (dockerized or virtualized) services such as Home Assistant and ownCloud.

The good news first: You can get a Verisign Authenticode code signing certificate for $99. Just check out https://sysdev.microsoft.com/ for details. This price even applies to the renewal when the original certificate expires after a year.

In case you have (un?)wittingly been juggling around with multiple EFS certificates like me, you may feel a strong urge to clean up the mess. Which mess? It can happen quite easily that different files are encrypted with different keys. In addition to that, directories that are marked for encryption have EFS certificates associated with them, and there is no UI to manipulate that. In order to straighten this out, once the proper certificate is in place each file and directory needs to be “touched” in order to update their encryption keys.

How can you mess up a simple OS upgrade by using encryption? Simple. Here is what happened to me when I upgraded my Windows 7 beta system to the RC version.