Certbot - Unable to Use Standalone for Google Cloud

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My domain is: www.djv.us

I ran this command: certbot certonly --standalone -d www.djv.us

It produced this output:
Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log
Cert is due for renewal, auto-renewing...
Renewing an existing certificate
Performing the following challenges:
tls-sni-01 challenge for www.djv.us
Waiting for verification...
Cleaning up challenges
Failed authorization procedure. www.djv.us (tls-sni-01): urn:acme:error:connection :: The server could not connect to the client to verify the domain :: Failed to connect to 216.58.216.147:443 for tls-sni-01 challenge

IMPORTANT NOTES:

  • The following errors were reported by the server:

    Domain: www.djv.us
    Type: connection
    Detail: Failed to connect to 216.58.216.147:443 for tls-sni-01
    challenge

    To fix these errors, please make sure that your domain name was
    entered correctly and the DNS A record(s) for that domain
    contain(s) the right IP address. Additionally, please check that
    your computer has a publicly routable IP address and that no
    firewalls are preventing the server from communicating with the
    client. If you're using the webroot plugin, you should also verify
    that you are serving files from the webroot path you provided.

My operating system is (include version): Arch (uname -r = 4.10.13-1-ARCH)

My web server is (include version): I've no idea, I'm serving exclusively static content

My hosting provider, if applicable, is: Google Cloud Platform

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

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

Looks like some DNS trickery has recently been deployed - the ip address certbot is pulling up is within google but seems bogus. nslookup returns something else:

$ nslookup

www.djv.us
Server: 10.0.0.1
Address: 10.0.0.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
www.djv.us canonical name = ghs.googlehosted.com.
Name: ghs.googlehosted.com
Address: 172.217.6.147
Name: ghs.googlehosted.com
Address: 2607:f8b0:4000:802::2013

... but the Address changes frequently.

Hi @duanev

You currently have a webserver listening on port 443 and 80 which means standalone would not work unless you shut down the web server, run the standalone command and then bring the server back up.

I would suggest you review and implement the webroot challenge https://certbot.eff.org/docs/using.html#webroot

Andrei

I think you misread - my web server is not local. The last time I updated the certs (Feb this year) I used standalone - my server has not changed.

I have not - I haven't made any assumption about whether your web server is local or not. Nor have I made any assumptions if there are any changes to your server.

I have browsed to your webserver and noticed currently content is being served over HTTP and HTTPS which makes me deduce that you have a webserver server running

A review of standalone from the certbot manual User Guide — Certbot 2.7.0.dev0 documentation would outline why this would be a problem

specifically:

Andrei

Ok fixed.

So I probably never should have been able to use standalone (I had used it successfully for several renewals) - apparently it has now been fixed. :slight_smile: Webroot is definitely not correct for my google cloud setup (I don’t have a full OS instance where I can login, thus I cannot run certbot there to update files in the web server tree - but I don’t actually need any of this).

I used certbot certonly --manual to generate the .pem files locally, then updated the static html files in my git source tree, and used git push and gcloud app deploy to update my challenge.

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