When the appliance is down

While the appliance is down, the certificates on your servers keep working. Nothing is renewed, deployed or alerted until it is back.

When you need this

When the appliance is down right now, or when you are writing a contingency plan.

What keeps working

Part	While the appliance is down
Certificates on your servers	Work until they expire. They do not depend on the appliance.
Renewal	Waits. Within 3 hours of starting, the appliance looks for certificates due for renewal.
Service agents	Keep running and retry at growing intervals. They check in when the appliance answers.
Alerts	Not sent, because the appliance is what sends them.

A certificate that sslbrain renews normally has weeks left. A 90-day certificate is renewed about 30 days before expiry, and a longer certificate 30 days before. The ones usually close to expiry are:

uploaded certificates, which sslbrain does not renew;
certificates whose renewal or deployment has already failed.

Check when the first certificate expires. The Expiring certificates card on Overview shows those expiring within 30 days. A certificate that became due for renewal during the outage is renewed at the first check once the appliance is back, see First certificate on a server.

An agent installed with an install code waits at most an hour between attempts by default, see Largest backoff (seconds) in How the agent reaches the appliance. A Windows agent installed without an install code can wait up to a day.

Alerts about the appliance itself must come from your own monitoring. Monitor the appliance’s HTTPS address.

Bring the appliance back

Start at the top, and move one step down if it does not help.

Restart the appliance. Click Restart under Appliance and licence › System. If the web interface does not respond, choose 5 Restart the appliance in the console menu. If that does not help, choose 8 Reboot this machine, see Console menu.
Open the vault. The appliance opens it with a key from sslbrain Cloud as soon as it can reach sslbrain Cloud. To get in before then, log in with the 12 backup words, see When something does not work.
If the software is broken, choose 9 Danger zone and 6 Reinstall the appliance software (data kept) in the console menu. Certificates, settings, accounts and the database are kept, see Keep sslbrain up to date.
If data is damaged, restore a backup and open the appliance with the 12 backup words, see Save a backup and restore from it.
If the machine is lost, move the licence to a new appliance. Data does not move with it, see Move or restore the appliance.

A failed update does not take the appliance down. It keeps running the version it had, see When something does not work.

If the appliance shows Installation locked when it comes up, see Installation locked.