A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
are you actually running a web server on that host? iirc, certbot will place a temporary token to be served by your web server (Apache, etc.) to show that you actually control the domain you are requesting a cert for.
I switched to DNS based retrieval as soon as let's encrypt offered it, so its been years since I retrieved certs via http.
actually I'm not hosting any web servers currently )
if you are using http cert retrieval, certbot needs a place put the temp. token to authenticate your contrrol of the domain your are creating a certificate for. usually that will be the same webserver you want to serve the certificate from.
if you are not running an actual weberver on port 80 that certbot can insert a token for, certbot cannot complete.
this is, of course, in addition to other possible issues such as ISP port blocking - but without a web server listening on TCP/80, you will have to use other authorization methods (like DNS) to generate a cert.
what would you recommend to a newbie?
I use letsencrypt a lot, if firewalls are an issue I’ll use dns authentication.
If you are struggling and need a quick fix, the free tier of zero ssl will do a similar thing
I used it to get a cert for my printer
Since this is on a home network, have you also forwarded port 80 from your router to your machine running certbot?
This is one of the reasons I use the DNS challenge instead... Then you don't have to route all these Let's Encrypt challenges into your internal network.
like this?
You don't need UDP on port 80 forwarded through. HTTP is TCP only.
Sounds like you have nothing listening on port 80 that resolves for your domain for Let'sEncrypt to verify that you own the domain. You need a webserver listening on port 80 and that Certbot can access if you're using the http method.
Basically you're forwarding traffic to port 80 but there's nothing on port 80.
Many home ISPs block port 80 and 25. You should be able to Google that and confirm. If that's the case you'll have to use a different method.
ISP said that it does not block port 80
Try something like https://www.webpagetest.org/ or any other "proxy" service to confirm for youself if it is publicly accessible.
Http is port 80, but https is port 443. I'd try opening that too.
In this situation certbot is using 80 for a challenge/response test to have the host validate itself as the source.