after finding out the images I was using were wrong Ive gotten to the point now of running the letsencrypt image and fowling out the same spot Agricola was with the port forwarding. I'm doing this for my work and am trying to go off an existing system, the current network is an Airport Extreme base station with an older external hard drive attached that we all share. not to mention they used a belkin router as a switch because the Airport didn't have enough Ethernet plugs haha. in any event I am bringing in my old router witch is pretty nice (huge improvement to whats here) and try letsencrypt with that
but to the point of deleting the files in the letsencrypt folder here is a simple and pretty powerful command you can do from the shell in a box or any other terminal. You're right you most likely don't have to delete everything but I always do when doing stuff like this just incase. Especially when its as easy a this command.
to delete a folder use this
root@server:~# rm -rf /path/to/directory/
to delete everything in the folder use this
root@server:~# rm -rf /path/to/directory/*
so it will look like this for everything in the folder
root@server:~# rm -rf /sharedfolders/AppData/Letsencrypt/*
hope this helps you guys and hopefully I'll have a remote server up and running tomorrow. this post has helped quite a bit so far. Thanks