Renewal painful

http then.

used to be only about seventy bucks a year.

why the … tone of the email??

Your post doesn’t make any sense. Let’s Encrypt certificates are free. And what e-mail? Please elaborate?

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I apologize for lack of clarity. I was warned, via email, that I need to
renew by January 17. Now, is that not true?

Sorry, my crystal ball is broken…

Without the contents of the e-mail, we can only guess…

Also, did you already set up certificate renewal? Or just install the cert, but nothing more?

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Again, sorry I know I’m missing something, but I’m trying to understand how
to properly respond to what was said:

"Hello,

Your certificate (or certificates) for the names listed below will expire
in 19 days (on 18 Jan 17 05:20 +0000). Please make sure to renew your
certificate before then, or visitors to your website will encounter errors.

allegiancelaw.com
www.allegiancelaw.com

For any questions or support, please visit
https://community.letsencrypt.org/. Unfortunately, we can’t provide support
by email.

If you are receiving this email in error, unsubscribe at
http://mandrillapp.com/track/unsub.php?u=30850198&id=de89c64bc4004c3591ac42bec0f7161b.ncgKYbXWfQv9PW%2BLYeMcbUe%2FzRw%3D&r=https%3A%2F%2Fmandrillapp.com%2Funsub%3Fmd_email%3Dcortese.consulting%40gmail.com
(HTTP link, we know. We’re working on it!)

Regards,
The Let’s Encrypt Team"

a) How did you get your certificate(s) in the first place? (Which client? Which command?)
b) Have you set up a proper renewal process for your certificates?
c) What’s wrong with the “tone” of the e-mail?
d) Do you even know what “expire” means in the context of certificates?
e) If the answer to “d” is “no”, ugh, nevermind.

I’m not sure what your complaint is about the tone of the email.

The information seems perfectly correct - your current certificate is only valid until the 18th January, so it’s advising you that you should renew it.

There are probably 2 issues here.

  1. The wording of the email that you find has a “tone” you don’t like. I’m sure Let’s Encrypt would welcome constructive feedback as to how you feel it could be improved.

  2. Your certificate needs renewal, Are you confident about renewing it ? or would you like help ? If you’d like assistance, please provide some information about your system and how you obtained the certificate ( i.e. what client did you use, what commands ).

There’s nothing wrong with the tone of the email.

wow. Sorry but I was only asking for a bit of help. SSL is not something
I do every day. I don’t remember so well but I followed some instructions,
probably on digitalocean.

Can you provide answers to

My operating system is (include version):

My web server is (include version):

My hosting provider, is (I’m guessing digitalocean, please correct me if I’m wrong):

I can login to a root shell on my machine (yes or no, or I don’t know):

I’m using a control panel to manage my site (no, or provide the nameand version of the control panel):

Hi @chrisco23, this e-mail is meaning to be helpful (to warn users that their certs are going to expire). The renewal is free and can normally be done the same way that the original certificate issuance was done; some, but not all, of the tools that work with Let’s Encrypt make this automatic.

The renewal is timed so that if you do have a tool automating it at least a month before expiry, and you don’t change the certificate contents, you should never see the reminder message.

Per other people’s replies, we would be glad to hear suggestions for how the reminder could be made friendlier or clearer. We thought it was important information because people’s sites are likely to break if they don’t have some process in place to renew their certificates. (All digital certificates for web sites expire at some point and have to be renewed, although 1-year certificates are more common in the industry than our 90-day certificates.)

If you can describe your situation in more detail, we’ll be happy to try to figure out what you can do to get your certificate renewed (and perhaps to automate the process in the future).

2 Likes

If it helps, set up a cronjob to check for and renew your certificates for you. This takes the guess work out of it and normally by the time you receive such an email your server will have already renewed it., go read tutorial below.

I thought I had the cron set up per cookbook link, but now at 3:27am I
discover the thing is down.

Any recommendations for quickly bringing it back to normalcy?

Thanks again,
Chris

I think I managed to get the renew happening. I guess I’ll have to take
another look at the certbot cronjob piece but I thought I had followed it
to the letter a couple weeks back.

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