Month: February 2018

I was having failures creating new certificates in certbot due to a change in their code. I previously ran the following command to create a website certificate for an apache server running on Debian 8 Jessie.

# certbot run --verbose --text --apache --rsa-key-size 4096 --email your-email.com --agree-tos -d your-domain-name.com,alternative-domain-name.org,third-domain-name.com

This used to work but now (2018-0226) it doesn’t. Here is the output of error:

Performing the following challenges: 
Client with the currently selected authenticator does not support any combination of challenges that will satisfy the CA.
Exiting abnormally:
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "/usr/bin/certbot", line 11, in <module>
 load_entry_point('certbot==0.10.2', 'console_scripts', 'certbot')()

I found the answer here: https://github.com/certbot/certbot/issues/5405

The following command worked, substitute working values for “your-email.com” and “your-domain-name.com”.

# certbot certonly --standalone --verbose --text --rsa-key-size 4096 --email your-email.com --agree-tos -d your-domain-name.com --pre-hook "systemctl stop apache2" --post-hook "systemctl start apache2"

This is for the following version of certbot.

# certbot --version
certbot 0.10.2

The end 🙂

I am running a Debian 8 Jessie email server with postfix and dovecot. I wanted to change from self signed certificates to certificates from Let’s Encrypt. It was easy to do and I wish had not waited so long to change. This blog post, https://www.shivering-isles.com/lets-encrypt-free-trusted-certificates-for-postfix-and-dovecot/ explained it perfectly for me, so there is no need for me to document the commands.

https://letsencrypt.org/