Certbot failed to authenticate some domains

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1

Please fill out the fields below so we can help you better. Note: you must provide your domain name to get help. Domain names for issued certificates are all made public in Certificate Transparency logs (e.g. https://crt.sh/?q=example.com), so withholding your domain name here does not increase secrecy, but only makes it harder for us to provide help.

My domain is:

I ran this command: sudo certbot --nginx --nginx-server-root=/usr/local/nginx/conf/

It produced this output:
Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log
Please enter the domain name(s) you would like on your certificate (comma and/or
space separated) (Enter 'c' to cancel): s49.iems5718.ie.cuhk.edu.hk
Requesting a certificate for s49.iems5718.ie.cuhk.edu.hk

Certbot failed to authenticate some domains (authenticator: nginx). The Certificate Authority reported these problems:
Domain: xxxxxxxxxxx
Type: unauthorized
Detail: x.x.x.x: Invalid response from http://xxxxxxxxxxxx/.well-known/acme-challenge/6rM6GMFFp58B9CmX9pf_CZOWXgNfr8abq2Am1p4nOtY: 403

My web server is (include version): nginx 1.26.3

The operating system my web server runs on is (include version):ubuntu 22.04

My hosting provider, if applicable, is:

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

I'm using a control panel to manage my site (no, or provide the name and version of the control panel): no

The version of my client is (e.g. output of certbot --version or certbot-auto --version if you're using Certbot): 3.2.0

2

This tells me something is responding, but not how Let's Encrypt wants, so either certbot is failing with its nginx configurations, or something else is responding (cdn, waf, ...?)

And this tells me I can't even expect to reproduce your issue. :smiley:

4 Likes
3

I don't understand what's wrong with the website you provide about my domain. (Sorry, I don't know a lot about that.) And I actually don't modify a lot about my nginx configuration. I will attach it.
My nginx conf
And I don't have any services else that will responde. It is also impossible for the frontend to responde to this url, right?

4

That domain name has (or had, when I checked) no dns records associated. That's not good if you want to use http-01 validation, but you did get a 403 before, so I either made a wrong assumption about your domain name or your dns records have changed.

1 Like