Question
SSL 521 error: Cloudflare a-record pointing to DigitalOcean droplet
- Posted on August 24, 2020
- DigitalOcean
Asked by jmwebguy
I have read many posts about this issue but I am still having issue.
Client is using Cloudflare, Full SSL for their website. I have a ubuntu digitalocean droplet with a web-app that needs SSL. I have created the a-record WEBAPP in Cloudflare pointing to the IP of my digitalocean droplet. So, webapp.mydomain.com should answer at digitalocean with HTTPS. Note: http works fine.
I have confirmed firewall is accepted https and 443 is open.
I read documentation about adding a cert to the droplet but Let Encrypt says I need nameservers pointing to DigitalOcean. **Is this a requirement? I would prefer to not have to move the nameservers since the only thing on digitalocean is this one app.
What I am missing here? Thanks!
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Hi,
Did you try to diagnose the problem with https://letsdebug.net/ ? Can you give us a test result from there, please ?
Hello,
I assume that you’re using a CDN service like CloudFlare. The 521 error will usually occur when there is CDN enabled and it will indicate an issue between your local machine and the server or between the CDN and the server itself.
What I usually recommend is to temporarily disable the CDN in order to determine if the issue lies on the droplet, e.g issue with the web-server (Apache/Nginx) or it is DNS related, or some other issue with the CDN.
Error 521 can also occurs when the origin web server refuses connections from Cloudflare. Security solutions at your origin may block legitimate connections from certain Cloudflare IP addresses.
You can also make sure that port 443 is open with this command:
Also, you can check our tutorial for whitelisting IPs with iptables:
If you’re using CloudFlare you can check this post from their community:
https://community.cloudflare.com/t/how-do-i-temporarily-disable-cloudflare/68798/2
Regards
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