Certificate Chain Issues

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My domain is:

ingest.wmssfm.com

I ran this command:

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=ingest.wmssfm.com

It produced this output:

Chain issues 	Incorrect order, Extra certs

My web server is (include version):

Apache, 2.4.62

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

Debian Linux 12 Bookworm

My hosting provider, if applicable, is:

None - Self-hosted

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):

certbot 3.0.1

In my SSL configuration for the site, I have the following:

<VirtualHost *:443>
    SSLEngine on

    ServerName ingest.wmssfm.com
    ServerAlias nextcloud.wmssfm.com

    SSLCertificateKeyFile    /etc/letsencrypt/live/ingest.wmssfm.com/privkey.pem
    SSLCertificateFile       /etc/letsencrypt/live/ingest.wmssfm.com/cert.pem
    SSLCertificateChainFile  /etc/letsencrypt/live/ingest.wmssfm.com/fullchain.pem

   # enable HTTP/2, if available
    Protocols h2 http/1.1

    # HTTP Strict Transport Security (mod_headers is required) (63072000 seconds)
    Header always set Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=63072000"

   Alias / "/var/www/nextcloud/"
    <Directory /var/www/nextcloud>
      Require all granted
      AllowOverride All
      Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
      Satisfy Any

      <IfModule mod_dav.c>
        Dav off
      </IfModule>
    </Directory>

</VirtualHost>

# intermediate configuration
SSLProtocol             TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3
SSLOpenSSLConfCmd       Curves X25519:prime256v1:secp384r1
SSLCipherSuite          ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305
SSLHonorCipherOrder     on
SSLSessionTickets       off

When I use the SSL Labs test or the Namecheap SSL checker, I see an extra certificate in the chain, which is flagged as a chain issue.

I see the ingest.wmssfm.com certificate, followed by an ingest.wmssfm.com certificate, followed by the E6 certificate.

What is the second certificate? Is there something I can look at or change to fix the issue?

My original issue was sometimes seeing an error about not being able to get the issuer of the certificate. Found another post in the forum about that, which led me to note the fullchain.pem was not called out in my SSL configuration for the site. Fixed that, and now I have this.

If it matters, I am using certbot to do the HTTP challenge instead of the DNS challenge, as I cannot access my hosting provider DNS to create the challenge record. I just learned of ACME-DNS, and will have to see about giving that a try. I would need to figure out the firewall routing, though, for an external query to that server as I only have a limited number of public static addresses, and they are all in use already.

Try:

    SSLCertificateFile       /etc/letsencrypt/live/ingest.wmssfm.com/fullchain.pem
    #SSLCertificateChainFile  /etc/letsencrypt/live/ingest.wmssfm.com/fullchain.pem
6 Likes

That did it. Thanks!

I marked this as the solution. I thought I had gotten that configuration from another post here, but must have closed that tab and am not able to find it now. Doesn't matter - commenting out the chain file and changing the cert.pem to be fullchain.pem fixed the problem. Looks good at this point.

6 Likes

The SSLCertificateChainFile directive was for older versions of Apache and is deprecated in modern versions. SSLCertificateFile is all you need for the entire chain of certs.

6 Likes

Thank you. Hopefully, this will help someone in a similar situation as mine.

Thanks again for your assistance. Much appreciated.

6 Likes

Thank you so much, you made my day.

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