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I inherited a web-server that uses letsencrypt with certbot. At first I thought it seemed straight forward, but running certbot-auto renew fails. I then did a certbot-auto certonly --apache and that downloaded a cert just fine (That then running renew again pick ups and even says its new doesnt neeed renewal). Not sure what I am missing or have yet to learn but some of the failure messages are: (names changed to protect the innocent)

Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log



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Processing /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/xyx.someaddress.com-0004.conf
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Cert is due for renewal, auto-renewing...
Plugins selected: Authenticator webroot, Installer None
Renewing an existing certificate
Performing the following challenges:
http-01 challenge for xyx.someaddress.com
Waiting for verification...
Challenge failed for domain xyx.someaddress.com
Cleaning up challenges
Attempting to renew cert (xyx.someaddress.com-0004) from /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/xyx.someaddress.com-0004.conf produced an unexpected error: Some challenges have failed.. Skipping.
All renewal attempts failed. The following certs could not be renewed:
  /etc/letsencrypt/live/xyx.someaddress.com-0004/fullchain.pem (failure)

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IMPORTANT NOTES:
 - The following errors were reported by the server:
1 renew failure(s), 0 parse failure(s)
Domain: xyx.someaddress.com
   Type:   unauthorized
   Detail: Invalid response from
   https://xyx.someaddress.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/oMvZoCPBM8qZjYcIOlSHs0SLophprew9-c9zASc9d1s
   [192.41.211.157]: "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC \"-//IETF//DTD HTML
   2.0//EN\">\n<html><head>\n<title>404 Not
   Found</title>\n</head><body>\n<h1>Not Found</h1>\n<p"

   To fix these errors, please make sure that your domain name was
   entered correctly and the DNS A/AAAA record(s) for that domain
   contain(s) the right IP address.

So the biggest thing is I see the 'to fix these errors', but what does it mean domain name was entered correctly..where? and the DNS A/AAA are the right Ip address? No Idea where i check that. The conf file has many (omitted) domain names in it here but looks like this:

[renewalparams]
authenticator = webroot
account = ******************
server = https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory
[[webroot_map]]
xyx.someaddress.com = /var/www/html
www.xyx.someaddress.com = /var/www/html

Running the standard certbot-auto with the certonly for apache created a new folder in:

/etc/letsencrypt/live

and in that folder had the latest .pem files, so i went to where the only place I saw where to change the SSLCertificateFile which was in:

/etc/httpd/extra/ssl-certs and also /etc/httpd/extra/ssl-certs-proxy.

The files I have point now to the new location of the .pem files (which are symlinked from the live folder).

Running openssl on these pem files it does seem like they expire correctly now yet when I goto:

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest

put in my site that is live, it says the cert was valid giving a date of yesterday and that it is expired. I cannot figure out where my apache insists on using old certs. Is there a cache to clear out?

Also to note, /etc/httpd/logs the ssl_error_log gives a lot of these warnings:

[Mon Sep 02 06:43:22.246692 2019] [ssl:warn] [pid 4478] AH01909: RSA certificate configured for web-server.xxx.yyy.zzz:443 does NOT include an ID which matches the server name (not sure if this is relevant)

I did make sure the .well-known/acme-challenges was writable (just made it chmod 777 for now to triple make sure, won't keep it like that of course). Though again, I have all new certs (ditching the renewal option) and apache still isn't using them.

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  • Is Apache configured correctly for this document root? the lets encrypt validation is performed on HTTP, not HTTPS. Sep 2, 2019 at 8:15
  • You also need to configure Apache to read the corresponding private key file. Sep 2, 2019 at 8:46
  • what do these configurations look like? is it a line in httpd.conf I am looking for? (The really bummer part is nothing seems to be installed in its default or normal places so hunting for these files (and the right versions of these) has been a pain)
    – Codejoy
    Sep 2, 2019 at 23:17
  • Do you fixed this one Nov 28, 2019 at 6:27

1 Answer 1

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Have you checked that path "https://xyx.someaddress.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/" exists and apache/httpd have permission to this path?

Create this path and provide apache/httpd permission.

https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/renewal-attempts-http01-challenge-failed-for-all-domains/89891

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  • So it seems like the path does exsist: /home/arc/public_html/WWW/.well-known exsists, but no acme challenge? should I be running the certbot auto renew as apache not as root? the .well-known shows it as owned by root root drwxr-xr-x
    – Codejoy
    Sep 2, 2019 at 7:06
  • I should add I did run certbot auto to run with just the apache certonly flags. It did make a new folder in /etc/letsencrypt/live with the pem files sys linked to others that seem to have new dates. I did change the ssl-certs and ssl-certs-proxy to point to the new /etc/letsencrypt/live/thenewwwwmade/cert.pem etc, this seemed to have no effect even after an apachectl restart
    – Codejoy
    Sep 2, 2019 at 7:12
  • edited post for more info.
    – Codejoy
    Sep 2, 2019 at 7:57
  • edited my post...check the link...may be it help. Sep 2, 2019 at 8:26
  • Okay that link had some info, I did a test using the website he suggested and our results for our website was: check-your-website.server-daten.de/… But I am not sure what all this is telling me? Under section 8.certificates I see the expired certificate but I cannot tell where the server is grabbing that cert from to point it to a different place (even if the certobt auto renewal didnt work I would think I could point it to new certs?!)
    – Codejoy
    Sep 2, 2019 at 23:25

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