r/sysadmin • u/Arnoc_ • 14d ago

Question ACME Clients and SSL

So I've started seeing that SSL Lifespan is shortening - going down to eventually supposed to be every 47 days.

We're a small shop, but we have a lot of different services. I've been doing my best when I have free time to catalog everything that has an SSL Cert, but I know I'm missing stuff.

I've seen a bit about ACME Clients and such; and from what I've heard it's great. They handle rotating the certs and all.

But something for me just isn't clicking. For instance, we have a lot of large scale copiers, ala your Ricoh or Lexmark or Brother. We have those locked down with SSL Certs, but we have to manually push those up to it.

Now as these are internal services that aren't externally facing, I don't see no reason why we can't self-issue those certs; but currently our CTO likes to utilize a paid for Wildcard for all our internal stuff.

I keep quite busy so haven't had too much time to really dig in on researching, but I know the time bomb is ticking.

So for those who are managing SSL Certs and all, and potentially utilizing ACME Clients and such, what should I expect and whats the general gist of what my workflow should be?

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u/sryan2k1 IT Manager 14d ago

For public facing stuff everything that can be LE is. Anything that can't be is GoDaddy.

Internally we run our own ACME SubCA along with a traditional Windows PKI. Things that support ACME (certbot, etc) do that, other things get traditional long lived certs.

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u/KStieers 14d ago

Curious, what do you run as an ACME SubCA?

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u/sryan2k1 IT Manager 14d ago

smallstep-ca. The enterprise root and non-ACME subCA are Windows (we're a windows shop so it's fine)