Invalid response from .well-known when running certbot

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1

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: gencyberbook.com

I ran this command: sudo certbot --apache

It produced this output:
Performing the following challenges:
http-01 challenge for gencyberbook.com
Waiting for verification...
Challenge failed for domain gencyberbook.com
http-01 challenge for gencyberbook.com
Cleaning up challenges
Some challenges have failed.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

My web server is (include version): Apache/2.4.41 (Ubuntu)

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

My hosting provider, if applicable, is: AWS

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 0.40.0

I have been trying to fix this issue for days and still no results. I have checked that port 80 and 443 are allowed in the security groups for the AWS EC2 instance and also checked that the DNS records are correct. Please help!

2

Hi @nathan-jimin,

What's the output of:

sudo apachectl -t -D DUMP_VHOSTS
3

Hi @_az!
Here is the output
ubuntu@gencyberbook:/etc/apache2/sites-available$ sudo apache2ctl -t -D DUMP_VHOSTS
VirtualHost configuration:
*:80 is a NameVirtualHost
default server gencyberbook.com (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf:2)
port 80 namevhost gencyberbook.com (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf:2)
port 80 namevhost gencyberbook.com (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/ossn.conf:1)
alias www.gencyberbook.com

4

Try add a dummy ServerName in this VirtualHost, like ServerName example.com.

I should also mention that this relates to a bug we fixed very recently in Certbot 1.17.0:

  • The Apache authenticator now always configures virtual hosts which do not have an explicit ServerName . This should make it work more reliably with the default Apache configuration in Debian-based environments.

... so if you install Certbot using our snap or pip instructions, it should work without the workaround.

5

Thank you so much! The certificate is now installed, but it seems I am going to do some other troubleshooting for apache2 now. This does fix my problem though!