Too many requests, too many currently pending authorizations, but actually no requests from me

[EmadFathy]

Hello everybody,

I’m using this command months ago. From the beginning I’ve created the certificate and since then I use this command to update it at the end of 90 days.

letsencrypt certonly --standalone  \
-d SUB.DOMAINNAME1  \
-d SUB.DOMAINNAME2  \
-d SUB.DOMAINNAME3  \
--email MYEMAILADDRESS --agree-tos --verbose

( The command has actually 28 sub-domains )

After updating the certificate no mess or playing with certificate everything stable and working smoothly.

Today when I’ve tried to update the certificate I’ve ran the command with --dry-run option and there was one domain had a problem, then I removed that domain, then ran the dry run again and it was fine no issues, (that’s only two dry run processes).

Then I’ve ran the command without the dry run to actually update the certificate, I got the following error

An unexpected error occurred:

Error: urn:acme:error:rateLimited :: There were too many requests of a given type :: Error creating new authz :: too many currently pending authorizations: see https://letsencrypt.org/docs/rate-limits/

Please see the logfiles in /var/log/letsencrypt for more details.

I’ve read about limits (https://letsencrypt.org/docs/rate-limits/), I know I didn’t hit any limits! (It was only two dry-runs)

I’ve tried to update again few hours later but still get the error.

Please, I have two question:

1. Is my problem related to this current issue “tls-sni challenge disabled” (https://letsencrypt.status.io/pages/incident/55957a99e800baa4470002da/5a55777ed9a9c1024c00b241) ?
2. What do you suggest to solve this problem?

Notes:

• I use letsencrypt command from the Ubuntu’s official repository on “Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS” on a VPS.
• There is NO Cron jobs for this command that may issued other requests in the background.

Thank you in advance,

[_az]

--dry-run is a misleading name, as far as I understand, it still performs all of the interactions with the ACME server. The “dry” part is avoiding mutating your local system.

If you need to make test runs, then I believe the correct strategy is to use the staging server (--staging/--test).

[mnordhoff]

@_az It’s okay. Certbot’s --dry-run automatically uses staging.

[EmadFathy]

Once the issue (https://letsencrypt.status.io/pages/incident/55957a99e800baa4470002da/5a55777ed9a9c1024c00b241) has been resolved, my problem gone, which shows obviously the relation between them. Thank you for every one try to help.