After a week of internship, I was dealing with the server and ran into an SSL error. It turned out that Cloudflare's proxy protection had disabled a CNAME record. The problem was resolved by bypassing DNS validation, though I still had to manually delete an extra TXT record. A hectic month kept me from catching it sooner, and I also need to keep a closer eye on the backup process.

Thoughts after Acme failed to auto-issue a certificate

A week into my internship, I finally found time to sort out the server, and immediately hit a problem with SSL. Looking at Acme alone, all I got was a resolution error, and I couldn't figure out what was going on — after all, if it were just a DNS resolution problem, why would the HTTP validation fail too?

Then I remembered these domains all have the little orange cloud enabled (Cloudflare's protection), so I turned off cname, and to be safe I also disabled the DNS validation, and then everything worked.

I went over to Cloudflare and honestly laughed at myself — how did I end up with this many TXT records, and I had to delete them one by one by hand.

It's been a whole month of being too swamped to keep up because of all kinds of other things, so this slipped through the cracks. Ugh.

By the way, I also checked on the various automation programs, and they're mostly fine except for backups — those need more monitoring.