Lets Encrypt Fails to authenticate secondary validation

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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: pages.masofino.com

I ran this command: sudo certbot --apache -d pages.masofino.com

It produced this output:
teodor@harbinger:/etc/apache2/sites-available$ sudo certbot --apache -d pages.masofino.com
Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log
Requesting a certificate for pages.masofino.com

Certbot failed to authenticate some domains (authenticator: apache). The Certificate Authority reported these problems:
Domain: pages.masofino.com
Type: connection
Detail: During secondary validation: 158.220.114.159: Fetching http://pages.masofino.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/UTgG_xGiyt6iOHgJIUqMiySYwkJPxyLrC4bnGdMyXcs: Timeout during connect (likely firewall problem)

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

Some challenges have failed.
Ask for help or search for solutions at https://community.letsencrypt.org. See the logfile /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log or re-run Certbot with -v for more details.

My web server is (include version): Apache/2.4.58 (Ubuntu)

The operating system my web server runs on is (include version): Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS

My hosting provider, if applicable, is: Contabo (158.220.114.159)

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 3.2.0

My site does work I can access it over internet, DNS works. I just get this error. This is my apache config.

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin xxxxxxxxxxx
ServerName pages.masofino.com

DocumentRoot /var/www/html/pages.masofino.com

ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/pages-error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/pages-access.log combined
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This means that it does work in the beginning and then it stops.

Primary validation comes from one of two Let's Encrypt datacenters, and secondary validation comes from random cloud providers all over the world. Is your firewall doing any kind of geofiltering?

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Firewall completely disabled. I use UFW.

teodor@harbinger:/etc/apache2/sites-available$ sudo ufw status
Status: inactive

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I'm seeing the same issue today. Randomly today is a day when Im trying to get a new certificate for a new domain and get the same error in response as you @Masofino.
Your domain IP traces to Dusseldorf. Is that correct? This is where my server is located too by Contabo. If may not be a coincidence.

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Yes I am having the same situation. I created new certificates a couple of weeks before and everything was fine, and now this happened to me today.

Yes the server is in Germany, probably Dusseldorf. I have multiple of them so i an not sure about the city. But Germany definitely.

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I am using Contabo as well

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It looks like there's some issue reaching your website from Australia and Singapore. https://www.geopeeker.com/fetch/?url=pages.masofino.com

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It might be something to do with that data center infrastructure then. I have submitted a support ticket to Contabo.

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Here's another useful web service showing issues with connectivity from some parts of the world:

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It is working today. Contabo support was not really helpful tho.

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