Resolved! Mail-in-a-Box on VM (dedicated server)

[cwilkins]

Hello All!

First off I want to thank Josh and the whole Mail-in-a-Box team for this fantastic product. About a year ago I was looking for a way to get my domains off of Office365 and investigated a few different products. After testing this product for bit on one of my spare domains it was the option I decided to go with.

I am currently running my mail-in-a-box on a VPS in Germany and the VPS is coming up for renewal here in the next few weeks. I have to do a 1 year renewal to keep the price I have, but the system is overkill (2 core 8GB ram 500GB HD) but the cost was pretty good. In the last month I have decided to get a dedicated server in the cloud closer to my home (NA) to improve performance and latency but also to move all of my services off of my home network out to the cloud.

My dedicated server is running Windows 2012 with Hyper-V installed (24 core, 32GB ram 512 SSD 5 public static IPs). I have made a number of attempts to get Mail-in-a-Box to run in a VM using Ubuntu 14.04, but each attempt fails at different points. My last attempt I have the following errors on the status page:

OpenDKIM is not running (port 8891).
Public DNS (nsd4) is not running (port 53).

Port None (SSH Login (ssh)) should be allowed in the firewall, please re-run the setup.

I have re-run the setup, and did a number of things to try to get the services running, but so far I have not gotten any closer to getting the system to run.

I suspect I am missing something when I install Ubuntu and wanted to see if anyone has gotten this to run in an VM. I did search through the forums but have not found the solution.I did find one post that states that the Ubuntu server has to be very basic, but that did not list what services to install or not install.

I doubt I am the only one to try this so any suggestions or tips would be very appreciated.

Thanks!
Chess

[cwilkins]

I found the solution last night, and figured it’d update the post in case anyone else has this issues.

In the end it was two issues:

1. Apache2 is installed by Ubuntu by default. This needs to be removed. The scripts says it is removing Apache, but it does not seem to do it.
2. SSH Server has to be installed before running the setup. It looks like the script does not install the SSH server when it installs required packages.

I have tested this 2 different times to see if I just got lucky, but I can replicate it. I suspect if I had installed the SSH server on the first attempts and then re-ran the setup that would have fixed my issues.

[murgero]

Just to clarify: As long as Apache is running on ports other than 80 & 443 for web, it can run along side nginx, and therefore run in MIAB.

Although I wouldn’t use the setup, it is possible.

[cwilkins]

Yes, that is correct, however you’d have to change the ports that Apache is running on before starting the MiaB installer, (and restart Apache) or you will have the same trouble I had.

But like you, I’d want to keep my MiaB setup clean, and just spin up another VM if I needed Apache, but I guess that would not be an option for everyone.