Who benefits from this? Even though Let’s Encrypt stresses that most site operators will do fine sticking with ordinary domain certificates, there are still scenarios where a numeric identifier is the only practical choice:
Infrastructure services such as DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) – where clients may pin a literal IP address for performance or censorship-evasion reasons.
IoT and home-lab devices – think network-attached storage boxes, for example, living behind static WAN addresses.
Ephemeral cloud workloads – short-lived back-end servers that spin up with public IPs faster than DNS records can propagate.
That’s kind of awesome! I have a bunch of home lab stuff, but have been putting off buying a domain (I was a broke college student when I started my lab and half the point was avoiding recurring costs- plus I already run the DNS, as far as the WAN is concerned, I have whatever domain I want). My loose plan was to stand up a certificate authority and push the root public key out with active directory, but being able to certify things against Let’s Encrypt might make things significantly easier.
I use a domain, but for homelab I eventually switched to my own internal CA.
Instead of having to do
service.domain.tldit’s nice to doservice.lan.Any good instructions you would recommend for doing this?
FYI you can get a numeric xyz domain for 1$ a year
At least for the first year.
Pretty sure it remains $1. But it’s specifically only 6-9 digit numeric .xyz domains.
Setting up a root and a immediate CA is significantly more fun though ;) It’s also teaches you more about PKI which is a good skill to have.
but for the love of god and your own benefit, put a name constraint directly on the root cert