Improve timeout error message

[SteffiZ]

Hi,
I had the same problem for days and I was relying on the hint "(likely firewall problem)", but it wasn't a firewall problem at all.
My situation: I run nextcloud and the certbot on a raspi (RasberryPi). The home network is connected to the Internet with a Fritzbox and port forwarding from outside to the raspi. DynDNS provider is DuckDNS. I took the raspi from the internet for a while and after the IP-address on DuckDNS differed from the IP-address of my router. As a consequence the verification process of the certbot did send the challenge to a wrong IP address which typically existed but of course couldn't handle it. This led to the timeout. After correcting the IP-address on DuckDNS, the verification ran without problems.
My wish to the cerbot programmers is to improve this in my eye misleading error message.

[MikeMcQ]

Welcome @SteffiZ

I moved your post into its own thread. We prefer each issue to have its own thread

I can understand your frustration but the message is "likely" firewall problem. It is true that a timeout error can be caused by various problems. But, my experience here is that it most likely is a firewall.

There are a wide variety of comms config problems that can also cause timeouts as you discovered. But, the requesting system can't readily know why. How could anyone other than you know that the IP address was incorrect for example?

[Osiris]

I agree with Mike here. IMO there's nothing misleading here. It would be misleading if the message said something like "definitely a firewall problem".

Next to firewall issues, an incorrect IP address is also a common issue. But Let's Encrypt can't possibly list all possible issues for a timeout in the error message. They've chosen to list the most common cause instead.

One could argue it should not list any cause at all, but e.g. link to a web page listing common causes including firewalls/IP address issues. But IMO web pages are most often not read at all..