F5 DevCentral

As a cynic I would say this is an attempt by Google and Cloudflare to collect DNS data. Why else would they provide this service for free?

Both Google's [1] and Cloudflare's [2] DNS privacy policy prohibits them from storing personally identifiable information or from correlating DNS information with other Google data coming from the same IP/account but it does allow them to store information about which domains are popular, from which locations and from which type of device.

TLS (and therefore HTTPS) provides a very useful fingerprint based on accepted cipher suites, extensions, compression methods...

[1] https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy

[2] https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/commitment-to-privacy/privacy-policy/firefox/

[3] https://devcentral.f5.com/articles/tls-fingerprinting-a-method-for-identifying-a-tls-client-without-decrypting-24598

> I'm using the acme.sh client but the process will be similar no matter which client you choose to use.

Always nice to see some variety in clients along side the official Let's Encrypt one.

While we do use the official Python-based client at works at times, whenever I install it via apt, and it pulls in a whole bunch of dependencies, it's a bit disconcerting to me.

I'm a bit partial to dehydrated, which is a shell script (works under Bash and Zsh): I find it a lot easier to understand. It's handy to put on Linux/POSIX-based appliances like F5s, where the only prerequisites are Bash, cURL, and OpenSSL (and standard Unix tools like sed, grep, etc):

* https://devcentral.f5.com/s/articles/lets-encrypt-on-a-big-ip

* https://github.com/EquateTechnologies/dehydrated-bigip-ansible

There're many things you can do with a spare linux box. I do keep a few 'project ideas' links just in case I got some spare time on hand.

Home file server with ZFS - http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/

Proxy Server - http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2008/10/08/8-things-you-can-do-with-a-proxy.aspx

Map-Reduce fun with Hadoop - http://www.michael-noll.com/wiki/Running_Hadoop_On_Ubuntu_Linux_(Single-Node_Cluster)

Donate bandwidth with a Tor Server - http://ubuntu-tutorials.com/2007/08/31/how-to-run-a-tor-server-donate-bandwidth-to-the-tor-network/

More good ideas - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2007/09/17/put-that-old-computer-to-good-use/

A Dial-In server - http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_dialin_server

Tcl is (last I knew) still remarkably big on “the edges” of networks: f5/a10 devices (iRules scripting[0]), used to be (is it still?) used for Cisco iOS scripting[1], was used as the glue language for Tealeaf session/network capture[2] (when it was deployed as on-premises installation ), and control language for Argonne National Lab cluster control[3]...

[0] https://devcentral.f5.com/s/articles/irules-concepts-tcl-the-how-and-why

[1] https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/ios-xml/ios/ios_tcl/configuration/12-4t/ios-tcl-12-4t-book/nm-script-tcl.html

[2] https://help.goacoustic.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043736414-Passive-Capture-Configuration-File-ctc-conf-xml

[3] https://www.mcs.anl.gov/~wozniak/papers/Swift_Tcl_2015.pdf

> Pure garbage.

From your link: "The servers are also
designed to deliver between 10Gbps and 40Gbps of continuous
bandwidth utilization"

So how many terabits per second are you pushing out? Oh… oh you're not? You're not network bound at all? Well then…

And for reference:
https://www.entrust.com/ssl-is-not-computationally-expensive-anymore/
https://devcentral.f5.com/articles/dispelling-the-new-ssl-myth
From 2011

> Google do it because their content is more dynamic

Isn't Youtube SSL?

It's worth pointing out that this article is a bit long in the tooth. Although perhaps biased responses, it's worth looking at some other thoughts on the subject:

http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2011/03/21/the-skeleton-in-the-global-server-load-balancing-closet.aspx

http://dev.robertmao.com/2007/06/30/global-dns-load-balancing-for-free/ (towards the end, and yes, the grammar is bad)

http://blogs.sun.com/davew/entry/thoughts_on_global_server_load