Domain certificate expired, rendering Cloudron instance inaccessible

[hiramfromthechi]

Hey everyone,

Hadn't logged into my Cloudron instance in a bit. Tried logging in today, and I'm unable to access it (seemingly) because of expired certificates. Is there a fix for this? I thought I had certificates set to autorenew.

Thanks in advance for the help.

[girish]

@hiramfromthechi You can just accept the certs in the browser and then go to Domains -> Renew Certs . The renewal is automatic, so maybe something is going wrong. Can you check the renewal logs ?

[hiramfromthechi]

@girish This was the strangest part... I was unable to accept the certs in Firefox:

Then I tried Brave, which did allow me to proceed despite the certificate warning, and the screen is just blank.

[mdc773]

@hiramfromthechi Try clearing the browser cache or using a different browsers

[girish]

Right, this is because of hsts most likely. In firefox, you can Ctrl+H (opens history in side bar). Search your domain. Right click and Forget about website. Then open a new tab and reload the site.

[hiramfromthechi]

Strange—I cleared the cache and did Forget about this site, which allowed me to accept the risk and continue this time.

However, it still appears blank (just like it did in Brave):

[girish]

@hiramfromthechi Do you see any errors in the browser console ?

[hiramfromthechi]

120 of them, to be exact:

[nebulon]

hm not sure where all this is coming from, but none of the files or errors are related to Cloudron. Somehow those look like browser built-in files erroring.

[necrevistonnezr]

@hiramfromthechi What browser is this?

EDIT: Of course, it's Firefox - who slowly becomes the IE of modern times, unfortunately. The Firefox error console is hardly usable in my experience, since every trivial deviation from some standard is marked as an error - including any error caused by extensions.
In order to get a clear picture, one would have to view the website in a "vanilla", non-beta, Firefox version, after clearing all caches and previous error messages.

[hiramfromthechi]

@necrevistonnezr It's a non-beta version of Firefox, fully updated, with no extensions, and all caches cleared. Still got error messages, though not as many this time:

[necrevistonnezr]

Most errors are related to the app.normandy.recipe.runner - it’s a tool by Mozilla to collect data and send it back to Mozilla (aka Telemetry):

Normandy is a system that allows Mozilla to instruct Firefox clients to perform a variety of actions to aid the user and gather feedback to guide Mozilla in developing a better browser for them. To do this, we need a way to instruct Firefox to perform certain actions without having to download an update or wait for a new release.

https://mozilla.github.io/normandy/dev/concepts.html
see also https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/normandy/normandy/data-collection.html

So it’s not really a problem of the website but an error in Firefox‘ telemetry.
As I said, Firefox has become a pain…

[scooke]

Can this user not just ssh into their box and run a cli command to renew the certificate(s)? Why is the discussion revolving around browser messages?

[hiramfromthechi]

@necrevistonnezr I tried on Firefox, Brave, and Safari. So are we 100% sure this is a browser issue?

[hiramfromthechi]

@scooke Happy to try this, if instructions are provided somehow. Thanks in advance.

[scooke]

I've looked around the forum (always a good thing to do, for future reference), and some people suggest A) restarting the entire server (if you can't ssh in, then you can always use the webhost VPS dashboard to restart), B) access the url using a TOR browser, C) accessing the url in Incognito mode (that's Chrome's name), and D) more complicated, but using an API call to renew, and E) and finally, I had found, but now can't, a series of posts where ppl were deleting certs from /home/yellowtent/boxdata/certs, and restarting the server, which would prompt Cloudron to regenerate the missing certs. I don't think this one is advised - however, since you are totally stuck, maybe.

A, B, C) https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/4390/managing-ssl-certs-via-cloudron-cli
D) https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/6073/cloudron-certs-update-api-doesn-t-work
E)

[girish]

@hiramfromthechi something else is off here. You should always be able to access Cloudron dashboard (Even with the fallback certs). Can you please write to support@cloudron.io with your domain name and I would like to debug it further .

[scooke]

I bet it'll be something like running a Ubuntu VM on a Pi at home from a mobile hotspot using both cloudflare and tailscale....!

[hiramfromthechi]

@girish Just emailed you—thanks.

[girish]

@hiramfromthechi thanks, I replied. Looks like MySQL is down.