A+ 100% blog

Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes

04 Jul 2025 — 1 min read

I switched to a wildcard cert, and while getting the ACME DNS challenge working^[1] I saw Let's Encrypt is removing support for OCSP (in favor of CRL URLs and the coming increasing shortening of cert validity). So I removed my OCSP Stapling and switched the certs, and testing, saw I was down to just an A.

My immediate thought was that SSL Labs was giving more weight to one of those things than I expected, but I was able to test and verify that those weren't the cause. Bewildered, I started just reconstructing my SSL config from scratch (at one point getting an A+ but only 90% Key Exchange and Cipher Strength, which I didn't know was even possible). Finally got to success, compared to the previous config, and saw the problem had been that I had inadvertently removed all the TLS 1.2 ciphers^[2], and since TLS 1.3 only is a valid configuration for some uses, it wasn't something that stood out for me in the SSL Labs report.

And now my server config is under version control^[3] :)

Something of a hassle since I'm using certbot out of fondness for the EFF, and they are now pushing snaps as the best delivery method and deprecated their PPA, and the dns plugin for my registrar isn't available as a snap. ↩︎
which BTW makes the SSL Labs scan much faster :) ↩︎
Next up, chef or puppet (I already know more ansible than I want to). Ironically, the only at all complex thing pre-blog was the OCSP proxy, now gone. ↩︎

Not a Nice Problem to Have: the weekly challenge 329 task 2

Task 2: Nice Strings: You are given a string made up of lower and upper case English letters only. Write a script to return the longest substring of the give string which is nice. A string is nice if, for every letter of the alphabet that the string contains, it

Y Translate? The weekly challenge 329 task 1

Task 1: Counter Integers: You are given a string containing only lower case English letters and digits. Write a script to replace every non-digit character with a space and then return all the distinct integers left. The first part is easy. In Python:[1] new_string = string.translate({ c:'

Property is Theft, Theft is Good: the weekly challenge 328 task 2

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Experimenting with isso comments

Experimenting with isso comments, we'll see how it goes.

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Not a Nice Problem to Have: the weekly challenge 329 task 2

Y Translate? The weekly challenge 329 task 1

Property is Theft, Theft is Good: the weekly challenge 328 task 2

Experimenting with isso comments