Help with SSL Certificate Renewal

Posted on September 4, 2021

I’m an absolutely noob…and I’m having a devil of a time trying to renew my security certificate.

I’ve followed most of the recommendations here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/someone-so-nice-to-help-me-renew-my-lets-encrypt-certificate

and have had no luck. I consistently get the following error (the certificate is for chat.dhilab.org. I could really use some help.

Attempting to renew cert (chat.dhilab.org) from /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/chat.dhilab.org.conf produced an unexpected error: Failed authorization procedure. www.chat.dhilab.org (http-01): urn:ietf:params:acme:error:dns :: DNS problem: NXDOMAIN looking up A for www.chat.dhilab.org - check that a DNS record exists for this domain. Skipping. All renewal attempts failed. The following certs could not be renewed: /etc/letsencrypt/live/chat.dhilab.org/fullchain.pem (failure)

The following certs are not due for renewal yet: /etc/letsencrypt/live/chat.dhilab.org-0001/fullchain.pem expires on 2021-11-13 (skipped) All renewal attempts failed. The following certs could not be renewed: /etc/letsencrypt/live/chat.dhilab.org/fullchain.pem (failure)

1 renew failure(s), 0 parse failure(s)

IMPORTANT NOTES:

The following errors were reported by the server:

Domain: www.chat.dhilab.org Type: None Detail: DNS problem: NXDOMAIN looking up A for www.chat.dhilab.org
- check that a DNS record exists for this domain

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Bobby

September 5, 2021

Accepted Answer

Hi there @watrall,

I’ve just checked your DNS settings using this tool here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tools/dns

And it looks like that you do not have a DNS record for your www version of chat.dhilab.org.

There is an A record for chat.dhilab.org but not www.chat.dhilab.org.

What you need to do is to add an A record for the www version to point to your Droplet’s IP address. Or alternatively, you could add a CNAME record for your www version to point to chat.dhilab.org.

Once you add the record you could again run the renewal command.

Let me know how it goes! Regards, Bobby