this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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I've recently gotten into self hosting. I have a VPS and a domain name and decided to set up Pangolin as a reverse proxy to my local homelab.

During the options in the installation, I was asked to provide an email address for "generating Let's Encrypt certificates". I don't have a clue what what role my email address plays into this nor what email I should provide for the setup, so I just gave one of my personal email address. Everything worked fine and the service was completely set up in the VPS.

However, logging into the dashboard, I was informed by my browser that the certificate of the website is self signed and visiting the page may be dangerous. Although I was later able to access the panel with https enabled, I felt this setup is not okay and decided I would need to fix it.

Unfortunately I have no idea how certificate issuing works. I tried to search for a solution online and read the docs for Pangolin and Traefik as well as rewatch the tutorial through which I set up Pangolin, but either they tend to skip explaining the email thing or go too much into detail without even explaining where to start. I also checked my inbox to see if the CA pinged me or something but to no avail.

I feel like I'm missing something in my setup which was apparent to everybody else. I would really appreciate if someone could help me ELI5 what the root cause of this 'email' problem is and how to fix it. I am willing to set up the service all over again or edit the config files if needed but I just need to know what to do.

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[–] bergetfew@sopuli.xyz 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you for your assist. I found the underlying issue to be with the DNS from the domain provider. I switched to Cloudflare DNS and now it works flawlessly.

[–] 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

for future reference there are a few ports that need to be open for let's encrypt to work, and it has a very small timeout (as you have found) so if the dns isn't great it fails. Cloudflare will cache your site/dns so usually works

[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Its just port 80. And letsencrypt provides a CIDR block so us paranoids who still restrict with firewalls can limit the exposure.