Redirecting an entire site except for the certbot webroot

In order to be able to use the webroot plugin for certbot and automatically renew the Let's Encrypt certificate for libravatar.org, I had to put together an Apache config that would do the following on port 80:

  • Let /.well-known/acme-challenge/* through on the bare domain (http://libravatar.org/).
  • Redirect anything else to https://www.libravatar.org/.

The reason for this is that the main Libravatar service listens on www.libravatar.org and not libravatar.org, but that cerbot needs to ascertain control of the bare domain.

This is the configuration I ended up with:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot /var/www/acme
    <Directory /var/www/acme>
        Options -Indexes
    </Directory>

    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond "/var/www/acme%{REQUEST_URI}" !-f
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.libravatar.org/ [last,redirect=301]
</VirtualHost>

The trick I used here is to make the redirection RewriteRule conditional on the requested file (%{REQUEST_URI}) not existing in the /var/www/acme directory, the one where I tell certbot to drop its temporary files.

Here are the relevant portions of /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/www.libravatar.org.conf:

[renewalparams]
authenticator = webroot
account = 

[[webroot_map]]
libravatar.org = /var/www/acme
www.libravatar.org = /var/www/acme
Dynamic DNS on your own domain

I recently moved my dynamic DNS hostnames from dyndns.org (now owned by Oracle) to No-IP. In the process, I moved all of my hostnames under a sub-domain that I control in case I ever want to self-host the authoritative DNS server for it.

Creating an account

In order to use my own existing domain, I registered for the Plus Managed DNS service and provided my top-level domain (fmarier.org).

Then I created a support ticket to ask for the sub-domain feature. Without that, No-IP expects you to delegate your entire domain to them, whereas I only wanted to delegate *.dyn.fmarier.org.

Once that got enabled, I was able to create hostnames like machine.dyn in the No-IP control panel. Without the sub-domain feature, you can't have dots in hostnames.

I used a bogus IP address (e.g. 1.2.3.4) for all of the hostnames I created in order to easily confirm that the client software is working.

DNS setup

On my registrar's side, here are the DNS records I had to add to delegate anything under dyn.fmarier.org to No-IP:

dyn NS ns1.no-ip.com.
dyn NS ns2.no-ip.com.
dyn NS ns3.no-ip.com.
dyn NS ns4.no-ip.com.
dyn NS ns5.no-ip.com.

Client setup

In order to update its IP address whenever it changes, I installed inadyn on each of my machines:

apt install inadyn

I added the following to /etc/inadyn.conf:

provider [email protected] {
       username = johndoe
       password = Password1!
       hostname = machinename.dyn.fmarier.org
       checkip-server = fmarier.org
       checkip-path = /whats-my-ip.shtml?machinename
}

and set the following in /etc/default/inadyn:

RUN_DAEMON="yes"

before restarting the service:

systemctl restart inadyn.service

Note that I am using setup my own lightweight IP address echoing service to get the external IP address, but using the default server seems to work fine too. In that case, there's no need to set the checkip-server and checkip-path variables.

Since I use logcheck, I also created a new /etc/logcheck/ignore.d.server/local-inadyn file with the following content:

^(\w{3} [ :[:digit:]]{11}|[0-9T:.+-]{32}) [._[:alnum:]-]+ inadyn[[[:digit:]]+\]: Starting DynDNS client : inadyn.$
^(\w{3} [ :[:digit:]]{11}|[0-9T:.+-]{32}) [._[:alnum:]-]+ inadyn[[[:digit:]]+\]: In-a-dyn version [0-9.]+ -- Dynamic DNS update client.$

Testing

To test that the client software is working, wait 6 minutes (there is an internal check which cancels any client invocations within 5 minutes of another), then run it manually:

inadyn --once --force --foreground --loglevel=debug

The IP for that machine should now be visible on the No-IP control panel and in DNS lookups:

dig +short machinename.dyn.fmarier.org