Hint: Please read the main article on server certificates first. This also explains what ACME is

Activating/Authorizing an ACME account is only required in special cases where the ACME server cannot access your server through HTTP/HTTPS, e.g. due to missing DNS entry or missing firewall access through you institute firewall or the enterprice cloud firewall). In most cases, however, ACME should work out of the box as described on the overview page about server certificates.

Activation process

Please follow these steps:

register an ACME account (see below)
read out the ACME account ID
- Linux with certbot versiobn 1.23 and higher:
```
certbot show_account --server https://acme.pki.cert.tu-dresden.de
```
- Linux with older certbot version
  - open the certbot config file "/etc/letsencrypt/accounts/acme.pki.cert.tu-dresden.de/<random>/regr.json"
  - extract the value starting with "urn:uuid"
  - if certbot is executed as an unprivileged user, the configuration is stored in "~/.acme"
- Windows with simple-acme:
  - open the file "Registration_v2" in the folder "C:\ProgramData\simple-acme\acme.pki.cert.tu-dresden.de"
  - extract the "Kid" entry, the value starting at "urn:uuid" is relevant
Send an email to service desk
- subject "ACME account activation"
- specify the domains you need
- please add a short explanation why you can't use "normal" ACME
We will verify if the requesting person is responsible for the requested domains.
when the account is authorized, it can be used to obtain certificates (for the authorized domains) without solving an ACME challenge

Register an ACME account

Linux with certbot

install certbot:

Debian/Ubuntu:
```
sudo apt install certbot python3-certbot-apache 
```
- if nginx is used, install python3-certbot-nginx instead

OpenSuSE/SLES:

sudo zypper install python3-certbot python3-certbot-apache

sudo certbot register -m ADMIN-EMAIL@tu-dresden.de --server https://acme.pki.cert.tu-dresden.de/

More information about cerbot: https://certbot.eff.org/

Windows with simple-acme

Download Simple-acme from https://simple-acme.com/download
extract the downloaded zip file

./wacs.exe --register --emailaddress ADMIN-EMAIL@tu-dresden.de --baseuri "https://acme.pki.cert.tu-dresden.de/"

Further information about simple-acme : https://simple-acme.com/

Display ACME account permissions

The following command shows which domains an ACME account is authorized for:

curl https://acme.pki.cert.tu-dresden.de/account/urn:uuid:$account_uuid

Hint: to improve formatting, please install the "jq" and pipe the output through jq:

curl https://acme.pki.cert.tu-dresden.de/account/urn:uuid:$account_uuid | jq