Problem with Certificate Auto Renew

schoen · July 24, 2017, 6:56pm

I was going to suggest

grep -r SSLCertificate /etc/apache2

to see how the certificates are or are not referred to within your Apache configuration.

There’s a delete subcommand in Certbot to delete a specific certificate that you no longer need.

codeman1234 · July 24, 2017, 8:04pm

I have done the grep command you suggest and I get this output:

/etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl.conf: # SSLCertificateFile directive is needed.
/etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl.conf: SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/mysite.com/fullchain.pem
/etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl.conf: SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/mysite.com/privkey.pem
/etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl.conf: # Point SSLCertificateChainFile at a file containing the
/etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl.conf: # the referenced file can be the same as SSLCertificateFile
/etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl.conf: #SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/apache2/ssl.crt/server-ca.crt
/etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default-le-ssl.conf:SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/mysite.com-0001/fullchain.pem
/etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default-le-ssl.conf:SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/mysite.com-0001/privkey.pem

Please correct me if I am wrong but, I should delete this 2 pem files bellow:
/etc/letsencrypt/live/mysite.com/fullchain.pem
/etc/letsencrypt/live/mysite.com/privkey.pem

If so, can you tell me what is the correct command on certbot to delete them if not then let me know what I should do.

Thanks!

schoen · July 24, 2017, 9:38pm

Nope, there are two problems with this:

It will confuse Certbot, because Certbot will still expect to be able to renew this certificate based on the existence of /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/mysite.com.conf.
It will break Apache, because your Apache configuration in default-ssl.conf refers to these files! If you try to start Apache while referring to a file that doesn't exist, Apache will fail to start.

I would suggest changing mysite.com in these paths in default-ssl.conf to mysite.com-0001. Then you can use certbot-auto delete --cert-name mysite.com to remove the old certificate.

codeman1234 · July 25, 2017, 11:10am

So, basically I renew that certificate with a different domain, that is what you mean?

Thanks!

schoen · July 25, 2017, 4:32pm

No, I’m suggesting that you edit your Apache configuration to stop referring to the mysite.com certificate. Your mysite.com-0001 certificate is apparently already OK. But if you delete the mysite.com certificate without first editing the Apache configuration, then the Apache configuration will be broken, because it currently references this certificate (even though it doesn’t need it for domain name coverage).

codeman1234 · July 25, 2017, 7:46pm

Hello @schoen

I think I got what you mean, please feel free to correct me if I am wrong:

I need to edit this file from apache2 => /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl.conf

correct?

I have did a cat on this file for you to see output which is here bellow:

ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

            DocumentRoot /var/www/html

            # Available loglevels: trace8, ..., trace1, debug, info, notice, warn,
            # error, crit, alert, emerg.
            # It is also possible to configure the loglevel for particular
            # modules, e.g.
            #LogLevel info ssl:warn

            ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
            CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

            # For most configuration files from conf-available/, which are
            # enabled or disabled at a global level, it is possible to
            # include a line for only one particular virtual host. For example the
            # following line enables the CGI configuration for this host only
            # after it has been globally disabled with "a2disconf".
            #Include conf-available/serve-cgi-bin.conf

            #   SSL Engine Switch:
            #   Enable/Disable SSL for this virtual host.
            SSLEngine on

            #   A self-signed (snakeoil) certificate can be created by installing
            #   the ssl-cert package. See
            #   /usr/share/doc/apache2/README.Debian.gz for more info.
            #   If both key and certificate are stored in the same file, only the
            #   SSLCertificateFile directive is needed.
            SSLCertificateFile      /etc/letsencrypt/live/mysite.com/fullchain.pem
            SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/mysite.com/privkey.pem

            #   Server Certificate Chain:
            #   Point SSLCertificateChainFile at a file containing the
            #   concatenation of PEM encoded CA certificates which form the
            #   certificate chain for the server certificate. Alternatively
            #   the referenced file can be the same as SSLCertificateFile
            #   when the CA certificates are directly appended to the server
            #   certificate for convinience.
            #SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/apache2/ssl.crt/server-ca.crt

            #   Certificate Authority (CA):
            #   Set the CA certificate verification path where to find CA
            #   certificates for client authentication or alternatively one
            #   huge file containing all of them (file must be PEM encoded)
            #   Note: Inside SSLCACertificatePath you need hash symlinks
            #                to point to the certificate files. Use the provided
            #                Makefile to update the hash symlinks after changes.
            #SSLCACertificatePath /etc/ssl/certs/
            #SSLCACertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl.crt/ca-bundle.crt

            #   Certificate Revocation Lists (CRL):
            #   Set the CA revocation path where to find CA CRLs for client
            #   authentication or alternatively one huge file containing all
            #   of them (file must be PEM encoded)
            #   Note: Inside SSLCARevocationPath you need hash symlinks
            #                to point to the certificate files. Use the provided
            #                Makefile to update the hash symlinks after changes.
            #SSLCARevocationPath /etc/apache2/ssl.crl/
            #SSLCARevocationFile /etc/apache2/ssl.crl/ca-bundle.crl

            #   Client Authentication (Type):
            #   Client certificate verification type and depth.  Types are
            #   none, optional, require and optional_no_ca.  Depth is a
            #   number which specifies how deeply to verify the certificate
            #   issuer chain before deciding the certificate is not valid.
            #SSLVerifyClient require
            #SSLVerifyDepth  10

            #   SSL Engine Options:
            #   Set various options for the SSL engine.
            #   o FakeBasicAuth:
            #        Translate the client X.509 into a Basic Authorisation.  This means that
            #        the standard Auth/DBMAuth methods can be used for access control.  The
            #        user name is the `one line' version of the client's X.509 certificate.
            #        Note that no password is obtained from the user. Every entry in the user
            #        file needs this password: `xxj31ZMTZzkVA'.
            #   o ExportCertData:
            #        This exports two additional environment variables: SSL_CLIENT_CERT and
            #        SSL_SERVER_CERT. These contain the PEM-encoded certificates of the
            #        server (always existing) and the client (only existing when client
            #        authentication is used). This can be used to import the certificates
            #        into CGI scripts.
            #   o StdEnvVars:
            #        This exports the standard SSL/TLS related `SSL_*' environment variables.
            #        Per default this exportation is switched off for performance reasons,
            #        because the extraction step is an expensive operation and is usually
            #        useless for serving static content. So one usually enables the
            #        exportation for CGI and SSI requests only.
            #   o OptRenegotiate:
            #        This enables optimized SSL connection renegotiation handling when SSL
            #        directives are used in per-directory context.
            #SSLOptions +FakeBasicAuth +ExportCertData +StrictRequire
            <FilesMatch "\.(cgi|shtml|phtml|php)$">
                            SSLOptions +StdEnvVars
            </FilesMatch>
            <Directory /usr/lib/cgi-bin>
                            SSLOptions +StdEnvVars
            </Directory>

            #   SSL Protocol Adjustments:
            #   The safe and default but still SSL/TLS standard compliant shutdown
            #   approach is that mod_ssl sends the close notify alert but doesn't wait for
            #   the close notify alert from client. When you need a different shutdown
            #   approach you can use one of the following variables:
            #   o ssl-unclean-shutdown:
            #        This forces an unclean shutdown when the connection is closed, i.e. no
            #        SSL close notify alert is send or allowed to received.  This violates
            #        the SSL/TLS standard but is needed for some brain-dead browsers. Use
            #        this when you receive I/O errors because of the standard approach where
            #        mod_ssl sends the close notify alert.
            #   o ssl-accurate-shutdown:
            #        This forces an accurate shutdown when the connection is closed, i.e. a
            #        SSL close notify alert is send and mod_ssl waits for the close notify
            #        alert of the client. This is 100% SSL/TLS standard compliant, but in
            #        practice often causes hanging connections with brain-dead browsers. Use
            #        this only for browsers where you know that their SSL implementation
            #        works correctly.
            #   Notice: Most problems of broken clients are also related to the HTTP
            #   keep-alive facility, so you usually additionally want to disable
            #   keep-alive for those clients, too. Use variable "nokeepalive" for this.
            #   Similarly, one has to force some clients to use HTTP/1.0 to workaround
            #   their broken HTTP/1.1 implementation. Use variables "downgrade-1.0" and
            #   "force-response-1.0" for this.
            # BrowserMatch "MSIE [2-6]" \
            #               nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown \
            #               downgrade-1.0 and
            #   		"force-response-1.0" for this.
            # BrowserMatch "MSIE [2-6]" \
            #               nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown \
            #               downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0

ServerName cdn.mysite.com
ServerAlias media.mysite.com
ServerAlias s3.mysite.com
ServerAlias img.mysite.com
ServerAlias secure.mysite.com
ServerAlias static.mysite.com

vim: syntax=apache ts=4 sw=4 sts=4 sr noet

So, I am guessing I should edit this 2 lines:

and change them to the following:

Also I wanted to ask you about last line on this file

This are old subdomains I add on the first time I run certificate, can you tell me if I can delte this since I am not using any of those subdomains anymore just using www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com

If I am wrong please let me know, I am just following this logic since on first config file of apache that I showed you before there is nothing about ssl that is why I am guessing this is the right one.

Thanks again

schoen · July 25, 2017, 7:48pm

Yes, that's right.

I don't know the effect of deleting these offhand because I don't know whether a ServerName directive is required in this file.

codeman1234 · July 25, 2017, 9:06pm

Hello @schoen

ok I have edited files and even renew certificate and it worked I got this output:

[quote]Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log

Processing /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/mydomain.com-0001.conf

Renewing an existing certificate
Performing the following challenges:
tls-sni-01 challenge for mydomain.com
tls-sni-01 challenge for www.mydomain.com
Waiting for verification…
Cleaning up challenges

new certificate deployed with reload of apache server; fullchain is
/etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.com-0001/fullchain.pem

Processing /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/mydomain.com.conf

Renewing an existing certificate
Performing the following challenges:
tls-sni-01 challenge for www.mydomain.com
Waiting for verification…
Cleaning up challenges

new certificate deployed without reload, fullchain is
/etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.com/fullchain.pem

Congratulations, all renewals succeeded. The following certs have been renewed:
/etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.com-0001/fullchain.pem (success)
[/quote]

Now to remove other certificate how do I do this? and about previous post the one that matters is the one called server name right? alieses dont matter that much?

Thanks!

schoen · July 25, 2017, 9:12pm

If you no longer have any references to /etc/letsencrypt/live/mysite.com/fullchain.pem and its associated files in your Apache configuration, then you can use the command I mentioned in

to delete the mysite.com certificate.

codeman1234 · July 26, 2017, 11:10pm

Hello @schoen

Ok, I think I did it right, let me show you the steps I took so you can confirm me if I did it correctly:

Everything works correctly so, far!

So, what I am missing to do? Now I need to change renewal date on contrab, right?

Can you show me how to do it so it renews every 1st of every month? so, it does it once a month or can you tell me why you recommend doing this once a day?

Thanks again @schoen I been learning a lot with you.

schoen · July 26, 2017, 11:20pm

The certbot renew command looks at every certificate and tries to renew only those that are less than 30 days away from expiring. This is designed in part for people who might have many different certificates on their servers, which may have been issued at different times.

Trying to renew when necessary is the idea here. Here are some reasons why we prefer this approach (attempt to renew once or twice per day, but only those certificates that are less than 30 days from expiring) to others:

compared to trying to renew on a specific day of the month: if the renewal fails for some reason, you won't try again for a full month (!); also, for people who have several different certificates from us, this will create more risk of running into rate limits

compared to trying to renew immediately before expiration: if the renewal fails for some reason, you won't have very much time to investigate the problem before the certificate expires

compared to trying to renew as soon as permitted (e.g. 1 week after issuance): this seems to create unnecessary load on our servers

If you run certbot renew from cron once or twice per day, you shouldn't have trouble with rate limits because it will check every day, but not actually perform a renewal action most days. But you should get a renewal promptly 30 days before the certificate expires. If this doesn't happen or you get errors or you get a reminder from the Let's Encrypt CA, you then have some time to figure out what the problem is.

The 0 1 1 */2 * time spec in crontab which you mentioned in your very first post renews at 1:00 on the first day of even-numbered months, which is especially risky in terms of what happens if something goes wrong with the renewal for some reason.

So I would suggest something like

43 3 1 * * cd /usr/local/letsencrypt && ./certbot-auto renew

The renew subcommand is meant to be as convenient and automated as possible for unattended automated renewals. We have also asked people to choose a random minute for their automated renewals so that we don't get unnecessary load spikes at the beginning of every hour (so that's why I said 43 here).

You can learn more about crontab by reading the manual page (man crontab). The fields are minute, hour, day, month, day of week, command. (Some crontabs come with a comment explaining this!) A * means "every" (e.g. a * for day means "every day").

codeman1234 · July 27, 2017, 12:09am

Awesome information @schoen

Thanks a lot for all so, I had add this line you recommend on crontrab

43 3 1 * * cd /usr/local/letsencrypt && ./certbot-auto renew

Now just 2 questions for me to get clear:

With this command when will renew?
On tutorial he also adds at the end " certonly --apache --renew-by-default --apache -d domain.tld >> /var/log/domain.tld-renew.log 2>&1" should I add that too? His full command is the following:

0 1 1 */2 * cd /usr/local/letsencrypt && ./letsencrypt-auto certonly --apache --renew-by-default --apache -d domain.tld >> /var/log/domain.tld-renew.log 2>&1

Thanks!

schoen · July 27, 2017, 12:23am

I'm sorry, I made a mistake which you exposed by asking this question. I meant to say 43 3 * * * instead of 43 3 1 * *. I wrote the wrong form because I was thinking about your suggestion to renew on the first day of the month.

Maybe you can look at the last paragraph of my previous post to see what the difference between these two is.

I think I explained in

some reasons why this is not desirable and shouldn't be used.

codeman1234 · July 27, 2017, 10:26am

Hello @schoen

No problem, I have change command on contrab to what you recommend the command bellow, please confirm if is correct:

I am sorry if you explained, I am just asking again because I did not understand it completely sorry for my ignorance but, for me this system is all new and I am learning as I go so, can you just tell the 2 questions bellow:

With this command when will certficate would get renew? (So I can check this cronjob works correctly)
Should I do anything else or the setup is all correct now and should not worry anymore?

Thanks again @schoen you been the best and again I am sorry for my ignorance I hope it does not bother you because for me this is all new.

schoen · July 27, 2017, 5:08pm

At 3:43 in the morning when it's less than 30 days from expiring.

[quote]2) Should I do anything else or the setup is all correct now and should not worry anymore?
[/quote]

You should wait until the certificate is 30 days from expiring and check that the cron job succeeds in renewing your certificate at the specified time.

codeman1234 · July 27, 2017, 10:38pm

Ok perfect, thanks for explaining to me. Can I just ask you one last favor can you give me command for cronjob so it renews every 5 days, so, I dont have to wait so long to check if it renews correctly?

Thanks again @schoen

schoen · July 28, 2017, 12:14am

There is no change to the cron job that would achieve this. Remember that that cron job runs every day, not every month.

If you go to /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/mydomain.com-0001.conf, there should be a commented-out line that indicates renew_before_expiry = 30 days. You can uncomment that line and set a different amount of time. The new amount of time that you set will be the amount of time before expiry when that particular certificate will be renewed by certbot renew. If it’s higher, the certificate will be renewed earlier; if it’s lower, the certificate will be renewed later.

codeman1234 · July 31, 2017, 11:23pm

Ok cool then I will wait, and when cronjob runs again I will let you know!

Thanks a lot for all the time and work @schoen really learn a lot from you, really appreciate it!

system · August 30, 2017, 11:23pm

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

Problem with Certificate Auto Renew

Processing /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/mydomain.com-0001.conf

new certificate deployed with reload of apache server; fullchain is /etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.com-0001/fullchain.pem

Processing /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/mydomain.com.conf

new certificate deployed without reload, fullchain is /etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.com/fullchain.pem

new certificate deployed with reload of apache server; fullchain is
/etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.com-0001/fullchain.pem

new certificate deployed without reload, fullchain is
/etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.com/fullchain.pem