The VPS provider named vpsmalaysia.com.my offers Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 64-bit Minimal as the OS.
Has anyone here tried setup of Mail In A Box on the above OS ?
How about CentOS 7 64-bit Minimal?
Please share your experiences.
Mail-in-a-Box is specifically made for Ubuntu, and the current version requires Ubuntu 22.04. The scripts won’t work or lead to unexpected behavior on other releases or on other distros.
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Can you recommend any good VPS provider that is Mail In A Box compatible?
Basically you need an IP with a good reputation, and a provider who will allow you to use port 25 incoming and outgoing. These two things are the biggest challenges. Otherwise, any provider that offers you a public IP (preferably dual stack IPv4 and IPv6) and Ubuntu 22.04 will do.
See also the discussion here: Clean Hosting Providers? - #3 by sugumaranv
Personally, I run my server here and never had any issues.
FWIW I tried two different providers offering Ubuntu 22.04 and had multiple weird problems with the setup. Ended up setting up a new box on 18.04 (same provider as one of the 22.04 versions that didn’t work) with v57a.
I think it can be a bit of luck with a VPS because they muck around with the installation to provide management “features” but this can break the mail-in-a-box installer which requires a clean install of the OS. If the VPS is KVM based you might be able to do a clean install from an iso, but if it’s a container you’re stuck with what they give you. The one I currently have working had a warning comment in /etc/resolv.conf saying not to edit the file because it would be overwritten.
Afaik this is an Ubuntu thing. Ubuntu uses netplan to manage the network settings, so if you change your resolv.conf directly, it will be overwritten by netplan after a reboot. If you want to change the DNS servers, you have to create a yaml file in /etc/netplan, or edit the existing one.
Note: It’s also possible that there is a cloud-init config file on your server that passes DNS settings to netplan. If that’s the case I don’t know whether the cloud-init config or your custom-config will be used.
But none of that should actually affect Mail-in-a-Box directly, and I’m pretty sure Josh and the contributors of MiaB have taken this into account, when they wrote their scrips.
OK, thanks for the info. I noticed that the MiaB installer changed /etc/resolv.conf to contain just one line:
nameserver 127.0.0.1
and the comments were gone, so I assumed it had edited the file directly. My provider has a place in the VPS control panel where I can specify custom nameservers, so I set that to 127.0.0.1 as well, just in case it decided to overwrite it with the default settings. It seems to be happy with that. I guess the upstream servers are specified somewhere in the nsd config.
That’s because they use bind9 to resolve some local services.
NSD is an authoritative name server, and cannot act as a DNS resolver or DNS forwarder. The actual upstream DNS requests to the Internet are handled by systemd-resolved. It most likely gets the upstream DNS servers from your VPS provider via DHCP. If no upstream servers are defined, it probably queries the authoritative nameservers of the respective TLDs directly. (Not a 100% sure about that last point, though.)
Hi,
I have had a great experience with Amazon AWS Lightsail which is available for a Singapore location. US$3.50/month. They do not have Ubuntu 22.04, but 20.04; however, it is very easy to upgrade to 22.04 just follow instructions such as https://jumpcloud.com/blog/how-to-upgrade-ubuntu-20-04-to-ubuntu-22-04.
You may need to ask them to set the reverse DNS which you can do once you have an AWS account using their online form.
Be sure to select a static IP in case you need to start over. Only ip4 can be static. The ip6 address changes with every new instance created.
Best wishes!
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