Silver Server Ops

Server-wide maintenance scripts and operational notes for the Silver Cloud Hetzner host.

This repo is for host-level improvements that are not tied to one specific app or service. SSL expiry alerts are the first check in the repo; more server-wide maintenance checks can be added here over time.

Implemented Checks

• SSL certificate expiry alerts

SSL Certificate Expiry Alerts

scripts/check-cert-expiry.sh checks every Let's Encrypt certificate under /etc/letsencrypt/live and sends an ntfy alert when any certificate expires in less than 25 days.

The threshold sits just below certbot's own renewal window. Certbot renews at 30 days remaining, so a healthy certificate never drops below that. A 25 day threshold fires roughly five days after renewal first fails and still leaves 25 days to fix it. A threshold below the renewal window means renewal has to stay broken for weeks before the alert trips, which is too late to be useful.

Install

sudo install -m 0755 scripts/check-cert-expiry.sh /opt/scripts/check-cert-expiry.sh

Root cron

15 8 * * * /opt/scripts/check-cert-expiry.sh >>/var/log/cert-expiry-check.log 2>&1

Defaults

CERT_DIR=/etc/letsencrypt/live
EXPIRY_DAYS=25
NTFY_URL=http://127.0.0.1:2586/certbot
ALERT_ON_NO_CERTS=true
CHECK_SERVED=true
SERVED_ADDR=127.0.0.1:443
SERVED_TIMEOUT=10

Served certificate check

Certbot writes a renewed certificate to disk, but nginx keeps serving the old one from memory until it is reloaded. A check that only reads /etc/letsencrypt/live reports everything as healthy while browsers are being handed an expired certificate.

With CHECK_SERVED=true the script also opens a TLS connection to SERVED_ADDR using each lineage's name as the SNI hostname and compares the served expiry against the file on disk. It warns only when the served certificate expires earlier than the one on disk, which is the signature of a renewal hook that stopped firing.

nginx completes a handshake with a fallback vhost certificate when SNI matches no server block, so the comparison is skipped unless the served certificate's SAN list actually covers that domain. A lineage that nginx no longer serves is therefore skipped rather than compared against an unrelated certificate. Set CHECK_SERVED=false to disable the check.

Overrides

EXPIRY_DAYS=40 /opt/scripts/check-cert-expiry.sh

If the ntfy topic is protected with an access token:

NTFY_TOKEN=your-token /opt/scripts/check-cert-expiry.sh

Manual test

sudo /opt/scripts/check-cert-expiry.sh

The script exits 0 when all certificates are healthy and 1 when it sends an alert or cannot run the check correctly.

Notification Notes

ntfy is a good default for this server because it is already self-hosted, simple to call from shell scripts, and supports useful alert metadata such as title, priority, and tags.

Alerts go to ntfy over http://127.0.0.1:2586 rather than the public https://ntfy.silverwal.com URL. The public URL is served by the same nginx whose certificates this script watches, so an expired or broken certificate on this host would fail curl's TLS verification and silently drop the very alert that reports it. The loopback address removes DNS, nginx, and TLS from the alerting path.

For jobs where silence is also a failure, pair ntfy with a dead man's switch such as Healthchecks. ntfy tells you what the script found; Healthchecks tells you when the script did not run at all.