Question

ubuntu 16.04 self-signed cert versus let's encrypt error

Hey There,

I have looked all over the interwebs for the answer to this, and can’t find one, so if this is redundant, I am sorry:

I installed ubuntu 16.04 on my Droplet, and put in the LAMP stack. I manage a wordpress site, so I added that. Wordpress only works with https, so I needed a certificate for the site.

I first used the tutorial here, and it worked, I guess, except that there were huge warnings all over Chrome and Safari that the site wasn’t safe!!, so I realized I needed an external CA, so I used this tutorial here. Man was that easy, except…

At this point I was getting the err_connection_refused and failure on load for the browsers, and I determined that it was an error relating to the two certificates. So I followed this, and part of that answer was to go back through the self-signed tutorial backwards. I disabled OpenSSH in the firewall, and enabled it, and tried several things, so now I think I’ve screwed myself and it is so all over the place that I will have to start over at the stack install to correct it.

So my question is this:

Is there a way to remove all traces of SSH protocols to start over at bare encryption again, or do I have to do a clean install, again.

I am out of ideas on how to fix this, and admittedly am not a network admin, so I am sure I simply messed something up, including not providing enough info here for proper answers from the forum, but I could really use some answers, otherwise it is back to square one tomorrow.

Thanks for allowing me this desperate moment.

Scot


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Accepted Answer

Hi @wscotgrey

You went the long way, I would say, but let’s see if we can get you back :-)

I don’t see why Apache certificates should have anything to do with SSH, but I’m guessing that’s just a typo and you meant SSL.

It would probably be easier if you paste the Apache vhost configuration for your site. Once we’ve cleaned up the configuration, then it should be fairly easy to follow the Let’s Encrypt tutorial, which you already followed with ease.

Your vhost configuration file(s) is located in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/

Sorry about that, I meant SSL, I have 3 files in that directory: 000-default.conf, 000-default-le-ssl.conf, and default-ssl.conf. I am not sure which you’re asking for, so here’s, edited for privacy, 000-default.conf:

<VirtualHost *:80> # The ServerName directive sets the request scheme, hostname and port that # the server uses to identify itself. This is used when creating # redirection URLs. In the context of virtual hosts, the ServerName # specifies what hostname must appear in the request’s Host: header to # match this virtual host. For the default virtual host (this file) this # value is not decisive as it is used as a last resort host regardless. # However, you must set it for any further virtual host explicitly. #ServerName www.example.com

    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html

    # Available loglevels: trace8, ..., trace1, debug, info, notice, warn,
    # error, crit, alert, emerg.
    # It is also possible to configure the loglevel for particular
    # modules, e.g.
    #LogLevel info ssl:warn

    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

    # For most configuration files from conf-available/, which are
    # enabled or disabled at a global level, it is possible to
    # include a line for only one particular virtual host. For example the
    # following line enables the CGI configuration for this host only
    # after it has been globally disabled with "a2disconf".
    #Include conf-available/serve-cgi-bin.conf

    Redirect permanent  "/" "https://mysite.com/"

Here’s 000-default-le-ssl.conf:

<IfModule mod_ssl.c> <VirtualHost *:443> # The ServerName directive sets the request scheme, hostname and port that # the server uses to identify itself. This is used when creating # redirection URLs. In the context of virtual hosts, the ServerName # specifies what hostname must appear in the request’s Host: header to # match this virtual host. For the default virtual host (this file) this # value is not decisive as it is used as a last resort host regardless. # However, you must set it for any further virtual host explicitly. #ServerName www.example.com

    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html

    # Available loglevels: trace8, ..., trace1, debug, info, notice, warn,
    # error, crit, alert, emerg.
    # It is also possible to configure the loglevel for particular
    # modules, e.g.
    #LogLevel info ssl:warn

    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

    # For most configuration files from conf-available/, which are
    # enabled or disabled at a global level, it is possible to
    # include a line for only one particular virtual host. For example the
    # following line enables the CGI configuration for this host only
    # after it has been globally disabled with "a2disconf".
    #Include conf-available/serve-cgi-bin.conf

    Redirect permanent  "/" "https://mysite.com/"

SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/mysite.com/fullchain.pem SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/mysite.com/privkey.pem Include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-apache.conf ServerName mysite.com </VirtualHost>

And here’s default-ssl.conf:

<IfModule mod_ssl.c> <VirtualHost default:443> ServerAdmin admin@mysite.com #ServerName mysite.com

            DocumentRoot /var/www/html

            # Available loglevels: trace8, ..., trace1, debug, info, notice, warn,
            # error, crit, alert, emerg.
            # It is also possible to configure the loglevel for particular
            # modules, e.g.
            #LogLevel info ssl:warn

            ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
            CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

            # For most configuration files from conf-available/, which are
            # enabled or disabled at a global level, it is possible to
            # include a line for only one particular virtual host. For example the
            # following line enables the CGI configuration for this host only
            # after it has been globally disabled with "a2disconf".
            #Include conf-available/serve-cgi-bin.conf

            #   SSL Engine Switch:
            #   Enable/Disable SSL for this virtual host.
            SSLEngine on

            #   A self-signed (snakeoil) certificate can be created by installing
            #   the ssl-cert package. See
            #   /usr/share/doc/apache2/README.Debian.gz for more info.
            #   If both key and certificate are stored in the same file, only the
            #   SSLCertificateFile directive is needed.
            #SSLCertificateFile     /etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem
            #SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-snakeoil.key

            #   Server Certificate Chain:
            #   Point SSLCertificateChainFile at a file containing the
            #   concatenation of PEM encoded CA certificates which form the
            #   certificate chain for the server certificate. Alternatively
            #   the referenced file can be the same as SSLCertificateFile
            #   when the CA certificates are directly appended to the server
            #   certificate for convinience.
            #SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/apache2/ssl.crt/server-ca.crt

            #   Certificate Authority (CA):
            #   Set the CA certificate verification path where to find CA
            #   certificates for client authentication or alternatively one
            #   huge file containing all of them (file must be PEM encoded)
            #   Note: Inside SSLCACertificatePath you need hash symlinks
            #                to point to the certificate files. Use the provided
            #                Makefile to update the hash symlinks after changes.
            #SSLCACertificatePath /etc/ssl/certs/
            #SSLCACertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl.crt/ca-bundle.crt

            #   Certificate Revocation Lists (CRL):
            #   Set the CA revocation path where to find CA CRLs for client
            #   authentication or alternatively one huge file containing all
            #   of them (file must be PEM encoded)
            #   Note: Inside SSLCARevocationPath you need hash symlinks
            #                to point to the certificate files. Use the provided
            #                Makefile to update the hash symlinks after changes.
            #SSLCARevocationPath /etc/apache2/ssl.crl/
            #SSLCARevocationFile /etc/apache2/ssl.crl/ca-bundle.crl

            #   Client Authentication (Type):
            #   Client certificate verification type and depth.  Types are
            #   none, optional, require and optional_no_ca.  Depth is a
            #   number which specifies how deeply to verify the certificate
            #   issuer chain before deciding the certificate is not valid.
            #SSLVerifyClient require
            #SSLVerifyDepth  10

            #   SSL Engine Options:
            #   Set various options for the SSL engine.
            #   o FakeBasicAuth:
            #        Translate the client X.509 into a Basic Authorisation.  This means that
            #        the standard Auth/DBMAuth methods can be used for access control.  The
            #        user name is the `one line' version of the client's X.509 certificate.
            #        Note that no password is obtained from the user. Every entry in the user
            #        file needs this password: `xxj31ZMTZzkVA'.
            #   o ExportCertData:
            #        This exports two additional environment variables: SSL_CLIENT_CERT and
            #        SSL_SERVER_CERT. These contain the PEM-encoded certificates of the
            #        server (always existing) and the client (only existing when client
            #        authentication is used). This can be used to import the certificates
            #        into CGI scripts.
            #   o StdEnvVars:
            #        This exports the standard SSL/TLS related `SSL_*' environment variables.
            #        Per default this exportation is switched off for performance reasons,
            #        because the extraction step is an expensive operation and is usually
            #        useless for serving static content. So one usually enables the
            #        exportation for CGI and SSI requests only.
            #   o OptRenegotiate:
            #        This enables optimized SSL connection renegotiation handling when SSL
            #        directives are used in per-directory context.
            #SSLOptions +FakeBasicAuth +ExportCertData +StrictRequire
            <FilesMatch "\.(cgi|shtml|phtml|php)$">
                            SSLOptions +StdEnvVars
            </Directory>

            #   SSL Protocol Adjustments:
            #   The safe and default but still SSL/TLS standard compliant shutdown
            #   approach is that mod_ssl sends the close notify alert but doesn't wait for
            #   the close notify alert from client. When you need a different shutdown
            #   approach you can use one of the following variables:
            #   o ssl-unclean-shutdown:
            #        This forces an unclean shutdown when the connection is closed, i.e. no
            #        SSL close notify alert is send or allowed to received.  This violates
            #        the SSL/TLS standard but is needed for some brain-dead browsers. Use
            #        this when you receive I/O errors because of the standard approach where
            #        mod_ssl sends the close notify alert.
            #   o ssl-accurate-shutdown:
            #        This forces an accurate shutdown when the connection is closed, i.e. a
            #        SSL close notify alert is send and mod_ssl waits for the close notify
            #        alert of the client. This is 100% SSL/TLS standard compliant, but in
            #        practice often causes hanging connections with brain-dead browsers. Use
            #        this only for browsers where you know that their SSL implementation
            #        works correctly.
            #   Notice: Most problems of broken clients are also related to the HTTP
            #   keep-alive facility, so you usually additionally want to disable
            #   keep-alive for those clients, too. Use variable "nokeepalive" for this.
            #   Similarly, one has to force some clients to use HTTP/1.0 to workaround
            #   their broken HTTP/1.1 implementation. Use variables "downgrade-1.0" and
            #   "force-response-1.0" for this.
            # BrowserMatch "MSIE [2-6]" \
            #               nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown \
            #               downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0

    </VirtualHost>

</IfModule>

vim: syntax=apache ts=4 sw=4 sts=4 sr noet

Thanks also for the rapid response. It is heartening.

Scot

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