Certbot gives UnicodeDecodeError

Help
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:
randomsoftware.net

I ran this command:
sudo certbot --apache

It produced this output:

Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log
Plugins selected: Authenticator apache, Installer apache
Enter email address (used for urgent renewal and security notices) (Enter 'c' to
cancel): neil@randomsoftware.net
An unexpected error occurred:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 4: invalid continuation byte
Please see the logfiles in /var/log/letsencrypt for more details.

My web server is (include version):
Apache 2.4.18

The operating system my web server runs on is (include version):
Ubuntu 16.04

My hosting provider, if applicable, is:
Digital Ocean

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

Error Log:

File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/certbot/display/ops.py", line 50, in get_email
    force_interactive=True)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/certbot/display/util.py", line 185, in input
    ans = input_with_timeout(message)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/certbot/display/util.py", line 88, in input_with_timeout
    line = rlist[0].readline()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.5/codecs.py", line 321, in decode
    (result, consumed) = self._buffer_decode(data, self.errors, final)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 4: invalid continuation byte
2018-09-10 09:45:04,011:ERROR:certbot.log:An unexpected error occurred:
2

Please show:
certbot --version
certbot certificates

3 
root@rsl-wordpress:~# certbot --version && certbot certificates
certbot 0.26.1
Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
No certs found.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
4

Please show:
grep -Eri 'servername|serveralias' /etc/apache2

5 
root@rsl-wordpress:~# grep -Eri 'servername|serveralias' /etc/apache2
/etc/apache2/mods-available/info.conf:	#  http://servername/server-info (requires that mod_info.c be loaded).
/etc/apache2/mods-available/status.conf:	# with the URL of http://servername/server-status
/etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf.dpkg-dist:	# The ServerName directive sets the request scheme, hostname and port that
/etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf.dpkg-dist:	# redirection URLs. In the context of virtual hosts, the ServerName
/etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf.dpkg-dist:	#ServerName www.example.com
6

I'm a little unclear on whether the Unicode error relates to the e-mail address that you were entering or to the content of one of your configuration files.

You could check the latter possibility with

grep -nRP '[\x80-\xFF]' /etc/apache2

I've worked it out at various times but this version of the command is from

7

Do you have any sites configured?

8

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