Question about OCSP Responder and "ocspresponses" table in DB

Help
1

The operating system my web server runs on is (include version):

Linux Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

My hosting provider, if applicable, is:

Amazon AWS

I can login to a root shell on my machine (yes or no, or I don’t know):

Yes

As part of exploring how Boulder works, I have externalized the database, while the rest of the components are still running inside Docker (on AWS).

Instead of talking to boulder-mysql, the Boulder components talk to an external database (MariaDB, on AWS RDS), … or at least that is what I intended.

Using “Sequel Pro”, I can easily connect to the database and see live changes to some tables: certificate, certificateStatus.

The OCSP Responder also seems to be working properly, since it correctly reports Good or Revoked, … but the database table ocspResponses contains 0 rows, and never seems to get updated.

If ocspResponses should be getting updates in real time, that could be a configuration error on my part, so it would be helpful to know what I should expect for a properly configured Boulder.

So my question is about the Boulder architecture, …

Where is the OCSP Responder storing its responses, since they seem to be correctly updated in real time? Are they cached in memory and periodically flushed to the database?

Any insights into OCSP Responder details would be appreciated.

2

Hi @dxjones,

I think you've fallen behind on Boulder's codebase. We have a migration in master that is applied by the dev env that drops this table. It's a vestigial artifact and isn't used by anything.

They're stored in the certificateStatus table in the ocspResponse field.

3

This makes more sense. Many thanks @cpu

I’ll just catch up to the latest Boulder codebase.