Error getting validation data, Type: connection

[nevadacityguy]

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: oystercatchergirl.ca

I ran this command: certbot --nginx -d oystercatchergirl.ca

It produced this output:
Requesting a certificate for oystercatchergirl.ca

Certbot failed to authenticate some domains (authenticator: nginx). The Certificate Authority reported these problems:
Domain: oystercatchergirl.ca
Type: connection
Detail: Fetching http://159.203.29.124:/oystercatchergirl.ca: Error getting validation data

Hint: The Certificate Authority failed to verify the temporary nginx configuration changes made by Certbot. Ensure the listed domains point to this nginx server and that it is accessible from the internet.

Some challenges have failed.

My web server is (include version): nginx/1.14.0

The operating system my web server runs on is (include version): Ubuntu 20.04

My hosting provider, if applicable, is: DigitalOcean

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): 1.17.0

This is a new website I'm trying to setup. I can access it (sort of) from my system at home via port 80 so it seems it is "available on the internet". I can't access it via https but assume at least part of the problem or maybe the whole thing may be because I don't have a certificate. I'm fairly new to nginx so could well have something in the nginx configuration wrong.

[rg305]

Hi @nevadacityguy, and welcome to the LE community forum

It seems that there is a bad redirection in place:

@nevadacityguy

Detail: Fetching http://159.203.29.124:/oystercatchergirl.ca: Error getting validation data

LE won't follow redirections to an IP.
The redirection seems to have removed/replaced the entire challenge path and file being requested.
Here is a test example request:

curl -Iki http://oystercatchergirl.ca/.well-known/acme-challenge/test-file-1234
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx/1.16.1
Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2021 01:02:36 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Connection: close
Location: http://159.203.29.124:/oystercatchergirl.ca

Furthermore, it seems that you are trying to update the site location via HTML rather than via DNS.
[GoDaddy URL forwarding?]

Name:    oystercatchergirl.ca
Address: 184.168.131.241

And IP 159.203.29.124

Which of those IPs do you control?

[nevadacityguy]

Wow - thanks very much for such a quick response! You are correct that I was using GoDaddy URL forwarding because I didn't understand the correct way to use the GoDaddy domain with my DigitalOcean server. I think I am on my way to solving this now, but if I still have trouble I will ask for more help.