Certificate is expiring on 2022-03-09 but renew not allowed

[Frankie]

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. crt.sh | 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: mail.cyberexcel.com.hk

I ran this command: certbot renew

It produced this output:
Attempting to renew cert (mail.cyberexcel.com.hk) from /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/mail.cyberexcel.com.hk.conf produced an unexpected error: urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rateLimited :: There were too many requests of a given type :: Error creating new order :: too many failed authorizations recently: see Rate Limits - Let's Encrypt. Skipping.

My web server is (include version): Apache/2.4.29 (Ubuntu)

The operating system my web server runs on is (include version): Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS

My hosting provider, if applicable, is: 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. I use ssh

The version of my client is (e.g. output of certbot --version or certbot-auto --version if you're using Certbot): certbot 0.27.0

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It used certbot renew --dry-run , and it shows me renew success. But when I do certbot renew, it failed with about message.

The certificate is going to expiry on 9-March. And I have no clue what do to.

Thanks you very much for the help!

Wish you all great day everyday!

[_az]

Wait an hour for the rate limit to subside and try again, without --dry-run.

It should either succeed, or we will be able to observe the real underlying error message, if any.

[Frankie]

Thank you very much for the prompt reply.

Actually, it happens yesterday night and I wait for 8 hours and try it in the morning and it still gives me the same quota error.
Anyway, I will try it again 3 more hours later.
letsencrypt.txt (552.9 KB)

I also attached the log for reference.

Many Thanks!

[_az]

Something weird is going on with your situation.

There are only 2 live orders in that log file, 3 hours apart: 2022-03-04 06:13:32 and 2022-03-04 09:34:12.

Both of them got rejected due to rate limits, but the rate limit in question only lasts 1 hour. This doesn't make sense. We are missing some information.

1. Is there any chance you cloned this server and the old one is still running?

2. Are there other log files in /var/log/letsencrypt/ which have been recently modified?

3. Is the same ACME account being used elsewhere?

[Frankie]

Problem solved!

Thank you very much for your help!

You pinned the issue ==> 1. Is there any chance you cloned this server and the old one is still running?

Exactly, there is a clone I did 2 months ago just for extra backup and inside that I forget to disable the wrongly configured cron job.

With your super keen insight, I solve the issue which make me feel bad for a day.

Thank you once again and wish you all the best!