Renewing certificates/failed-validation-limit

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: demo.fetalportal.com

I ran this command:
sudo certbot renew --force-renewal

It produced this output:
Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log

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Processing /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/demo.fetalportal.com.conf
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Plugins selected: Authenticator nginx, Installer nginx
Renewing an existing certificate for demo.fetalportal.com and www.demo.fetalportal.com
Failed to renew certificate demo.fetalportal.com with error: urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rateLimited :: There were too many requests of a given type :: Error creating new order :: too many failed authorizations recently: see Failed Validation Limit - Let's Encrypt

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All renewals failed. The following certificates could not be renewed:

  • /etc/letsencrypt/live/demo.fetalportal.com/fullchain.pem (failure)*
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    1 renew failure(s), 0 parse failure(s)

My web server is (include version):

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

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):

The version of my client is (e.g. output of certbot --version or certbot-auto --version if you're using Certbot): certbot 1.11.0

Hi, I have been tasked with dealing with this now from my previous boss. I never set up any of this so please bear with me, I have tried to give all the information I can figure out. I have a site I am trying to get running again that were using letsencrypt that have expired/close to expiring. There seems to be a few servers that have a cert for the same domain, some expired/some close (8 days). I have tried multiple times to renew and now I am getting the validation limit. Before when I ran renew I was getting the following output:
Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log

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Processing /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/demo.fetalportal.com.conf
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Cert is due for renewal, auto-renewing...
Plugins selected: Authenticator nginx, Installer nginx
Renewing an existing certificate for demo.fetalportal.com and www.demo.fetalportal.com
Performing the following challenges:
http-01 challenge for demo.fetalportal.com
http-01 challenge for www.demo.fetalportal.com
Waiting for verification...
Challenge failed for domain demo.fetalportal.com
Challenge failed for domain www.demo.fetalportal.com
http-01 challenge for demo.fetalportal.com
http-01 challenge for www.demo.fetalportal.com
Cleaning up challenges
Failed to renew certificate demo.fetalportal.com with error: Some challenges have failed.

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All renewals failed. The following certificates could not be renewed:
  /etc/letsencrypt/live/demo.fetalportal.com/fullchain.pem (failure)
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1 renew failure(s), 0 parse failure(s)

IMPORTANT NOTES:
 - The following errors were reported by the server:

   Domain: demo.fetalportal.com
   Type:   connection
   Detail: 3.17.36.66: Fetching
   http://demo.fetalportal.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/zn-_SabEAQdfXH1MZ8mDcLRusTb8ChsVGQNF20vsJOw:
   Timeout during connect (likely firewall problem)

   Domain: www.demo.fetalportal.com
   Type:   connection
   Detail: 3.17.36.66: Fetching
   http://www.demo.fetalportal.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/Ll66Gczv7jxb2ND-liYXDiBvljdXMTah2at_vzYVDg4:
   Timeout during connect (likely firewall problem)

   To fix these errors, please make sure that your domain name was
   entered correctly and the DNS A/AAAA record(s) for that domain
   contain(s) the right IP address. Additionally, please check that
   your computer has a publicly routable IP address and that no
   firewalls are preventing the server from communicating with the
   client. If you're using the webroot plugin, you should also verify
   that you are serving files from the webroot path you provided.

Welcome to the community @napDev

A few things. I see you have gotten certs for those names before. But, as you note, the renewal is failing.

First, please do not use --force-renewal. It does not "work around" problems and can quickly cause you to become rate limited which is a bigger problem.

Now, your DNS records point to an AWS EC2 instance name. Is that still your current instance name? If not, adjust your DNS to point to the new name. Or, just point the A and/or AAAA records directly to the IP address rather than using CNAME to the EC2 instance. As an aside, if you have an Elastic IP that can retain your IP address across EC2 instance creations.

If that is your correct DNS, check the EC2 Security Group. Because, I do not see port 80 (or port 443) open to your server. Port 80 needs to be open for the HTTP challenge used by the certbot nginx plug-in

nslookup demo.fetalportal.com

demo.fetalportal.com    canonical name = ec2-3-17-36-66.us-east-2.compute.amazonaws.com.
Name:   ec2-3-17-36-66.us-east-2.compute.amazonaws.com
Address: 3.17.36.66
8 Likes

Hey Mike, thanks for the quick reply!

So I had to restart the instances so the IP changed. I just changed the information in Route53 and got both the certs renewed now, just have to sort out the website side to get everything working again.

Thanks so much for the help!

3 Likes

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