Hello everyone,
I’ve been trying to set up a Mumble voice chat server on my home network using a Debian server. As part of the setup process, I need to obtain an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt for secure HTTPS access to the server. However, I’m encountering an error when running the Certbot client to request the certificate.
Here’s the command I’m running:
sudo certbot certonly -d mydomain.com
But I get the following error message:
Timeout during connect (likely firewall problem)
I’ve checked my firewall rules and confirmed that I’ve opened port 80 as required for the Let’s Encrypt verification process. Here’s the relevant rule in my ufw configuration:
80/tcp ALLOW Anywhere
Despite this, I’m still getting the timeout error. Has anyone else encountered this issue before? What steps should I take to troubleshoot further?
Thanks in advance for any advice!
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
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.
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.
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.
