Thanks, for some reason it was still not completing the validation. I got validations to work by following this:
If you get a fail message, Let's Encrypt can't access your server. This could be from the router blocking it or the ISP blocking it. You can go back to the dashboard, click on Let's Encrypt → Edit. Change validation method to DNS and put “cloudflare” under “DNS-plugin” but don't hit apply yet.
You need to give it access to your DNS records on cloudflare. To do this, SSH into the unraid server, go to
/mnt/user/appdata/letsencrypt/dns-conf, and find cloudflare.ini. Edit the file “nano cloudflare.ini” and put your email and cloudflare global API key on the appropriate lines. Save the file. Note that now that this file contains sensitive information you need to lock down the permissions. Run
sudo chmod 600 cloudflar.ini (this command didn't seem to work)
to make sure only the owner can access this file.
Now go back to the Unraid GUI and hit apply to validate with the DNS method.
Check the logs of the container, if all went well the validation will work, certificates will be issued and the server will be ready. You should now be able to go to https://domain:8443/ and see the default welcome page for NGINX. (got this instead: error 1016)
In the top corner of the browser you should see a green lock next to the URL to indicate that your connection is encrypted. (did see this, so I think I'm making progress)
So, for my domain i have the "A" record (cloudflare) set to my WAN address of my router. is this correct?
Back to trying to make this work. I will watch more videos and hopefully just have to edit a few things to point everything in the right direction. This is all new to me, but i enjoy trying to figure new things out...besides the frustrating parts of course.
Cheers!