SoylentNews

martyb [soylentnews.org] writes:

We've been up front with the community right from the start... and intend to keep doing so in the future.

Where we are at:

We have encountered an issue with Lets Encrypt (LE), the certificate issuer for the majority of our [sub]domains. Even though we can 'see' these domains from any number of different servers... for some unknown reason, LE fails to see them. So, at the moment, we are unable to get them to generate certs for us.

Separately, the cert for soylentnews.org is handled by Gandhi. As far as I understand it (and I'm no sysadmin so take a healthy dose of salt) there are only two members of our staff who have the ability to update that cert. (We obviously don't want to let world+dog have access to that, right? My guess is that at that time, having a couple people seemed sufficiently redundant and secure).

What it means to you:

You may encounter a warning from your browser when trying to access the site that a certificate has expired. I cannot speak for all browsers, but I've generally seen that along with the warning is an option to trust the cert anyway. (Note: along with allowing that exception, I've at least one browser default a checkbox to make the exception permanent. It's entirely up to you, but I see no reason to make it a permanent exception at this point.)

We are working on it, and obviously hope to have things straightened out sooner than later! On the other hand, should things go sideways, I want to keep the community informed about what's up, what's happening, and what you can expect.

tl;dr:

If the site becomes unavailable because of an expired cert, yeah, we know and we're working on it. Accept a temporary exception in your browser and we'll let you now when things are back to normal.

--martyb

P.S. Our Editor-in-Chief, janrinok, is currently undergoing preparations for a medical procedure... it's hard to say at this point, but it's likely he may be unavailable to help with the site for a couple weeks. Please join me in wishing him well for the procedure and for a speedy recovery!

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