On June 27:th, the https certificate for lemmy.today was supposed to renew itself. Its set up to automatically renew every 3 months, and its been working perfectly since the site was started over 2 years ago.
But this time it failed to do so, due to a syntax error in the web server config that was not noticed until this incident took place.
Its been fixed now but took more than a day unfortunantly. Sincere apologies for the long delay - it was because I was on vacation in Madeira and in the process of travelling home that day.
Life finds a way to kick us in the balls sometimes.
May I suggest signing up for hetrixtools.com
Free monitoring service that would have alerted you some weeks before the certificate expired.
Its an auto-renewing cert so it “always” works, but in this case there was a syntax error in the web server config, causing it to fail to actually reload the new cert. Will see what we can do to make that not happen again!
That cert is valid for 90 days at a time and is renewed every 60 days. So having an alert if the current certificate has less than 28 days remaining will give you an early warning that something went wrong with automation.
Ah yeah, thats a good idea. Thanks!