Newbie Needs More Help

[Datsys]

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. https://crt.sh/?q=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: caribsis.com

I ran this command: certbot certonly --agree-tos --email datsys.computerservices@gmail.com --webroot -w /var/lib/letsencrypt/ -d caribsis.com -d www.caribsis.com

It produced this output: IMPORTANT NOTES:

• The following errors were reported by the server:

  Domain: www.caribsis.com
  Type: None
  Detail: DNS problem: NXDOMAIN looking up A for www.caribsis.com -
  check that a DNS record exists for this domain

• Your account credentials have been saved in your Certbot
  configuration directory at /etc/letsencrypt. You should make a
  secure backup of this folder now. This configuration directory will
  also contain certificates and private keys obtained by Certbot so
  making regular backups of this folder is ideal.

My web server is (include version): Apache2

The operating system my web server runs on is (include version): Ubuntu 18.04

My hosting provider, if applicable, is: Digital Ocean

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): Kitty

The version of my client is (e.g. output of certbot --version or certbot-auto --version if you’re using Certbot): 0.31.0

How do I fix that error?

[mnordhoff]

@Datsys

• DNS problem: NXDOMAIN looking up A for www.caribsis.com -
  check that a DNS record exists for this domain

To use HTTP validation, you need to add one or more relevant DNS records at your DNS provider (Dynadot, apparently).

caribsis.com has this A record, giving its IPv4 address:

caribsis.com.  10800  A   161.35.106.52

www.caribsis.com has no DNS records at all.

I don’t use Dynadot, but it looks like they have documentation that shows how to add both records (including the one you already added, so you should be able to skip that step):

https://www.dynadot.com/community/help/question/create-A-record

To quote it:

7. In the “Subdomain Records (optional)” section, enter “www” as the subdomain, select “A” from the drop-down menu and then enter your IP address in the “IP Address or Target Host” box.

[Datsys]

Thank you for responding. Now that the procedure goes through, I am able to get as far as the sign in page of the site but after signing in it goes to a page can’t be reached error. The suggested solution is to start the server installation from scratch but after installing Apache I should go through teh Lets Encrypt procedure to make the server HTTPS so that I would use https://mydomainname.com to bring up the Apache Default page that confirms the web server is running.

Can this be done?