Problem during installation

[nomeme]

I experienced some problems during installation where the installation script could not detect the mailinabox service running.

● mailinabox.service - Mail-in-a-Box System Management Service
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/mailinabox.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Sat 2026-03-14 19:31:45 CET; 1h 2min ago
   Main PID: 78388 (gunicorn)
      Tasks: 3 (limit: 4552)
     Memory: 62.5M
        CPU: 1.430s
     CGroup: /system.slice/mailinabox.service
             ├─78388 /usr/local/lib/mailinabox/env/bin/python /usr/local/lib/mailinabox/env/bin/gunicorn -b <external-ip>:10222 -w 1 --timeout 630 wsgi:app
             └─78398 /usr/local/lib/mailinabox/env/bin/python /usr/local/lib/mailinabox/env/bin/gunicorn -b <external-ip>:10222 -w 1 --timeout 630 wsgi:app

The setup script start.sh explicitly searches for 127.0.0.1.

# Wait for the management daemon to start...
until nc -z -w 4 127.0.0.1 10222
do
        echo "Waiting for the Mail-in-a-Box management daemon to start..."
        sleep 2
done

Therefore this could somehow not be resolved even though the service was actually running.
As I did not have more time to investigate, I hope someone has a better solution than this:

#2561

Kind regards.

[jvolkenant]

You likely have a hosts entry for localhost that does not point to 127.0.0.1.

grep localhost /etc/hosts

[nomeme]

Nope sorry I had a fresh ubuntu 22.04 install with an empty /etc/hosts file (after the mailinabox install) and it got the ip from the local dns of the vps hosting service.
I must say that I did not check before running the mailinabox installation, but after the install /etc/hosts was empty.

[jvolkenant]

Then it would be good to add localhost to your /etc/ hosts file.

echo "127.0.0.1 localhost" >> /etc/hosts

MIAB does it's own dns lookups; and root dns servers don't know how to resolve "localhost", they'll just send you to TLD root. and there is no tld with "localhost"

[myfirstnameispaul]

fresh ubuntu 22.04

I find it more informative to include where it was installed from. Hosting ISP images are not the same as original distribution images. Note that most hosts permit ISO install, so without stating where the OS was installed from, it can't be assumed on the part of the reader.

Also, is there anywhere else that will break if localhost is not configured in /etc/hosts?