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How to get a free .arpa domain

131 pointsby ethanhawksleylast Monday at 10:21 PM14 commentsview on HN

Comments

RKearneyyesterday at 9:13 PM

As the post calls out, most certificate authorities will not issue certs against .arpa domains. I found this out the hard way when paying for CloudFlare's Advanced Certificates add-on for an .arpa domain I had successfully delegated and registered.

They return failures and exceptions when attempting to generate the certificate for the .arpa domain and then I spent months trying to get a refund (they are very slow to respond) and only caved once I threatened a chargeback for the service not working as advertised.

ggmlast Monday at 10:27 PM

Many people, including myself, tend to look at .arpa and think "oh yes, thats PTR queries" but forget the DNS doesn't have a global rule that ONLY the PTR query can be sent to the domain.

It's just a domain. You can put anything into your zone. A, AAAA, PTR, TXT, you can even put HESIOD records if you want to party like its Kerberos nineteen ninety IV.

ValdikSSyesterday at 9:13 PM

You can get a TLS certificate on .arpa.

https://crt.sh/?q=%25.arpa&exclude=expired&group=none

There are websites as well

https://5.8.7.1.7.1.3.2.6.1.9.4.e164.arpa/

winstonwinstonlast Tuesday at 6:22 PM

Do these free HE assigned IPv6 prefix(es) just remain valid indefinitely even when not actually being used/routed?

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LoganDarktoday at 4:23 AM

> feel free to provide fake information as it doesn’t verify any of it

Uhh... Please don't. This is how nice things get taken down due to abuse.

> This is handy because many (though not all) certificate authorities refuse to serve .arpa domains

IIRC, .arpa domains are based on locations in the address space. CAs are supposed to secure your connection to a specific entity, not only a specific location, so that's probably why.

preisschildyesterday at 8:17 PM

You might not even need to go through HE. Many ISPs allow you to set your own PTR records / rDNS delegations if you ask them, since this is also necessary to host email servers.

tostiyesterday at 7:15 PM

> Once DNS finishes propagating

Say what?

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indigodaddyyesterday at 9:33 PM

But why

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