I thought I had put certbot in cron before now

The certificate from certbot was expired as of the end of this November, but as you may observe from the lack of Posts and Zines, the move occupied much of my time and I was disinclined to be proactive.

Error message upon using certbot manually:

Problem binding to port 80: Could not bind to IPv4 or IPv6.

This issue was because I was using the --standalone flag on certbot which meant that it tried to start its own web service for the http challenge. Changing to --nginx flag meant we are no longer competing for access to port 80.

sudo certbot certonly --nginx   -d "$DOMAIN" -m "$EMAIL" --agree-tos --non-interactive   --preferred-challenges http

Once I restarted nginx, the web service at www.plesiosaur.net stopped rejecting connection requests and I will be able to post more.

cron

So one would think I would put it in cron to have this auto-renew. Since it expired, at first I thought I had simply forgotten. But when I looked in cron I did see it was there:

Well, perhaps the issue is that certificates appear to now expire every 90 days rather than annually. So I have adjusted the cron schedule to run in the morning every three months starting just before the next expiry in March.

We shall see how it goes.

Thank you for reading. Please let me know if there are any clarifications I can make or further questions I can answer either down in the comments, on LinkedIn, or hit me up on Mastodon.