The pending authorization rate limit is per-account, not CA-wide. It sounds like you may have accidentally created some number of authorizations that were never fulfilled. Unfortunately we haven’t yet implemented a way to purge old authorizations. However, pending authorizations expire off your account in 7 days, so you should be able to try again soon.
The limit is 300 pending authorizations per account. We chose that level with the idea that someone can complete 100 simultaneous authorizations to issue a 100-name cert (currently the max) without coming close to the limit. However, if the client crashes partway through it’s possible to leave authorizations in a pending state. @souki, can you describe more of the steps leading up to your current state?
To answer your other question @eva2000: We plan to keep the pending authorization limit, but as with other limits we may adjust it if it seems to be causing trouble for a lot of people.
The rationale is this: It’s easy to create an authorization you never intend to attempt validating, so we want to prevent attackers from filling up our database with bogus authorizations.
I have an idea how it happend:
I executed certonly, blue screen asked for email and confirmation of TOS. But the confirmation dialog stayed there for a minute - I killed it because I thought it was frozen but it was actualy creating authorizations in background.
I do alot of LE testing or plan to even more after public beta for integration work with my web stack and I am pretty sure my web stack’s end users will do as well. Currently ~3,000+ new downloads of my stack per month by users http://centminmod.com/letsencrypt-freessl.html.
But i don’t think myself or any of my users will hit 300 pending authorizations per account when using webroot authentication hehe
Hey, I kind of have the same issue. I had to force-quit my Let’s Encrypt client because of some errors which have been fixed now but I still get the
2016/03/29 18:22:17 [domain.tld] Could not obtain certificates
acme: Error 429 - urn:acme:error:rateLimited - Error creating new authz :: Too many currently pending authorizations.
error when I try to re-run the client to e.g. update the certificates or add new subdomains.
Is there any way to delete the current authorizations? I have also opened an issue at the GitHub repository of the client I used.
I have also hit this issue, I think it was caused by the installation of certbot from Debian jessie-backports and the fact that this package, unlike the letsencrypt package it replaced, has a crontab for renewal that actually works and lots of renewal requests were made for test sites that had been deleted but without the corresponding files in /etc/letsencrypt having been deleted.
Having a delete option would be appreciated — manually deleting files in /etc/letsencrypt is not a great idea as it is easy to make mistakes.
I guess I now have a wait a week before I can set any other sites up… *sigh*