Today i learned, quite by accident, that the Chrome certificate error page can be quite useful! If you get an NET::ERR_CERT_something-or-the-other error message, you can click that NET::ERR_CERT... code. Your cursor won’t change, indicating that the text is clickable, but it will display the problematic certificate or cert chain in PEM format. You can then copy the certificate. On your terminal, invoke the spell pbpaste | openssl x509 -noout -text (replacing pbpaste with whatever command on Linux or Windows to paste the contents of the clipboard if so needed)

It happened again. I let this site’s certificate expire. I’d blame my faulty calendar entry, but it’s really just a case of my procrastination. As i was getting ready to read my article on how to renew the Letsencrypt certificate the hard way, again, i saw that Gitlab Pages had something new to surprise me with. Automatic Letsencrypt Certificate Management. By the beard of Odin. Here are the steps to enable that

I got a nice and polite notice a month ago that my certificate on my blog is expiring. Thankfully i have documented the process on my blog, i thought. Sadly, i can’t remember on which of my computers i created the certificate. Also, i need that computer to renew the cert, and in the end, none of the computers i tend to use actually seemed to be able to renew the cert. So it looks like i’m having to renew the cert the Hard Way. From scratch.

Setting up a SSL certificate on a HP (HPE/Aruba) 2530 switch is not hard or complicated but it is frustrating when you try to figure out exactly how it’s done. There’s some terminology that isn’t immediately obvious and the switch tends to be a bit picky about how things are done. So with that said, let’s dive in. I’ll assume here that you have a functioning PKI on your site, or that you’re able to get a certificate request signed somehow.