Questions[apache-2.4](server)

I want to set up certbot for a webserver on a different port than 443. I got the following error when running

certbot --apache -d <sub>.<domain>.<ext>

Failed authorization procedure. sub.domain.ext (tls-sni-01): urn:acme:error:connection :: The server could not connect to the client to verify the domain :: Failed to connect to external_ip:443 for TLS-SNI-01 challenge

After this error I've read the man pages, where I found this:

--tls-sni-01-port TLS_SNI_01_PORT Port number to perform tls-sni-01 challenge. Boulder in testing mode defaults to 5001. (default: 443)

Then I tried the following to correct this error:

certbot --apache --tls-sni-01-port 14831 -d <sub>.<domain>.<ext>

After adding the tls-sni-01-port, I got the same error.

Is it possible to install a certificate with a different port, or am I doing something wrong?

Correction: response time (%D) is μs not ms! 1

This doesn't change anything about the weirdness of this pattern but it means that it is practically way less devastating.

Why is response time inversely correlated to request frequency?

Shouldn't the server respond faster when it is less busy handling requests?

Any suggestion how to make Apache "take advantage" of less load?

This pattern is periodic. That means it will show up if impressions drop below about 200 requests per minute - which happens (due to natural user-activity) from late night to early morning.

The requests are very simple POSTs sending a JSON of less than 1000 characters - this JSON is stored (appended to a text file) - that's it. The reply is just "-".

The data shown in the graphs was logged with Apache itself:

LogFormat "%{%Y-%m-%d+%H:%M:%S}t %k %D %I %O" performance
CustomLog "/var/log/apache2/performance.log" performance

My IP changes do a different D class, so I want to set a range:

123.123.123.xxx where the last segment can be 0-255.

Right now, Apache says:

<RequireAny>
   Require ip 127.0.0.1
   Require ip ::1
</RequireAny>

My apache server is running OK without any problems. It also doesn't issue any warning during restart. However, if I examine error.log I can see the following lines repeating from time to time:

[Wed Jun 25 18:15:56.295408 2014] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 8817] AH00163: Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.5.9-1ubuntu4 configured -- resuming normal operations
[Wed Jun 25 18:15:56.295570 2014] [core:notice] [pid 8817] AH00094: Command line: '/usr/sbin/apache2'
[Wed Jun 25 18:26:34.511247 2014] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 8817] AH00169: caught SIGTERM, shutting down

What do they say? How can I fix it?

I have some subdomains I want to redirect to specific ports on the same server. Say I have

dev.mydomain.com 

I want dev.mydomain.com to transparently redirect to mydomain.com:8080 and I want to preserve the original sub-domain name the url of the browser.

How do I do this with Apache 2.2? I have Apache 2.2 running on default port 80. I can't figure out the write configuration to get this to happen.

I have already set up dev.mydomain.com to resolve in DNS to mydomain.com.

This is for an intranet development server that has a non-routable ip address so I am not so concerned about exploits and security that would compromise a publicly facing server.