Comments on The Perfect Server - Ubuntu 18.04 (Nginx, MySQL, PHP, Postfix, BIND, Dovecot, Pure-FTPD and ISPConfig 3.1)

This tutorial shows the steps to install an Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) server with Nginx, PHP, MariaDB, Postfix, pure-ftpd, BIND, Dovecot and ISPConfig 3.1. ISPConfig is a web hosting control panel that allows you to configure the installed services through a web browser. This setup provides a full hosting server with web, email (inc. spam and antivirus filter), Database, FTP and DNS services.

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By: steve

hi,

thanks for that!

wanna do the setup with debian 9.4 instead of ubuntu.

any differences except the entries in /etc/apt/sources.list?

 

cheers

By: till

Use the Debian tutorial instead of the Ubuntu tutorial to install ISPConfig on Debian: https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/perfect-server-debian-9-nginx-bind-dovecot-ispconfig-3.1

By: gardo

phpmyadmin does not work, i can access the url :8081/phpmyadmin but it does not allow to login.

same with roundcube, it says cant connect to database.

 

Mysql is up and nothing in the logs.

By: JamesB

Works fine here in my server. There must be a general problem with MySQL on your server when two completely independent applications are not able to connect to MySQL on your system.

By: Jacques

What would be recommended system requirements for The Perfect Server as above?

4 vCPU, 8GB RAM ???

In addition, what would be the recommended partitioning scheme and sizes to keep things sensible?/boot - 512MB/swap - 1GB/var - 4GB/var/log - 2GB/ - 8GB???

By: till

The requirements depend largely on how much mail and web traffic you expect. I would say that 1GB RAM is the absolute minimum and 2GB+ recommended. The number of vCPU's depends only on the workload. In regard to partitioning, emails are in /var/vmail and websites in /var/www, so you should have a large /var partition as basically all website and email data will reside in that partition.

By: hacker

First thank you very mutch for the great how to!

In my case had error for roundcube an phpmyadmin sites:

ERROR 502 - Bad Gateway! The following error occurred:

This server received an invalid response from an upstream server it accessed to fulfill the request.

If you get this message repeatedly please contact the webmaster.

My Solution:

Replace in

/etc/php/7.2/fpm/pool.d/www.conf

listen = /var/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock

->

listen = /var/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock

and do

 /etc/init.d/php7.2-fpm restart

and Bad Gateway is away and roundcube works:)

without warranty, I believe it is a hack:)

 

By: Lyudmil

The lesson is great. How to set permissions to upload the FTP site folder?

By: IceManXS

Hello,

thank you for your tutorials, everythink worked fine for me. Except one mistake I found.

In this tutorial you use PHP 7.2 so we have to use fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock; instead of fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock; at the nginx Directives field for the aliasing of phpMyAdmin and roundcube. Otherwise you will get a error 502. Maybe you can fix this!

Kind Regards

By: Emmanuel Mnzava

After successful installation and configuration. Now i cant access site with friendly URL's.

Can you share nginx Directives  that will allow site to be accessed with friendly URL's like modrewrite in Apache.

Regards,

By: Glen

You reference installing PHP5 modules in the body of your text even though this version uses php 7.2. Also, you reference a php7.0 socket instead of the php7.2 socket. 

By: Cane

Thanks for your Tutorial

 

I have one problem though, if I want to loggin to isp with admin admin it tells me wrong password

By: till

The default password is not admin anymore, the installer sets a custom password for each install and shows that password on the screen during install. If you don't remember which password was shown by the installer, then you can reset the password like this: https://www.faqforge.com/linux/controlpanels/ispconfig3/how-to-reset-the-administrator-password-in-ispconfig-3/

By: Manuel Hernandez

I accidentally pressed Ctrl+C when installing ISPConfig, specifically when it was on this line:

Configuring Fail2banConfiguring Apps vhostInstalling ISPConfigISPConfig Port [8080]: 

How do I resume installation?

By: Pat

in my case the apache2 running instead of nginx and can't stop it :-(

By: till

This tutorial did not installed apache, so it must have been installed before. You probably did not start from a clean minimal system then.If you don't remember the start script of the apache instance that you installed, then use the killall command to stop it.

By: Pat

 and open the admin site results a blank page with the message:

Possible attack detected. This action has been logged. 

By: till

Probably you used a password for the admin that looks like a script attack so that it triggers the script filter. You can change the admin password like this: https://www.faqforge.com/linux/controlpanels/ispconfig3/how-to-reset-the-administrator-password-in-ispconfig-3/ or you switch off the IDS in /usr/local/ispconfig/security/security_settings.ini

By: FFG28

Hi,

I would like to use an apple mail client (Mojave) with this server implementation. I installed the server and is working as expected but the emaill account (on the client) only resolves mail if I access (separately) the user mailbox account in roundcube. If Logout of roudcube then the mail client stops working.

Any help is appreciated.

 

Regards,

By: Eugen

Hi,  hello everyone again. Ubuntu 18.04, MySql, PHP7.1 and Nginx  all got installed with no error till final stage installing ISPconfig got error;     

No PHP MySQLi functions available. Please ensure that the PHP MySQL module is loaded.

 I think it happened because PHP7 1.  Ok, I changed to PHP7.2  the enabled it, then got another error    bash: cd: too many arguments.    it looks like I am locked now.

any help please,  how to reset the ISPconfig install,

Thanks a lot.

 

By: till

This setup uses PHP 7.2, changing the default PHP version is not supported and will break the setup, so keep the PHP version that ships with the OS (in this case PHP 7.2) and follow the guide to the letter to get a working system. You can install other PHP versions as additional PHP versions for ISPConfig, but do not change the default PHP of the OS as ISPConfig and also other packages of the OS like phpMyAdmin rely on it.

By: Ernesto La Fontaine

Hi, I get "Server sent passive reply with unroutable address. Using server address instead." when i try to connect to ftp 

 

Thanks

By: till

https://www.howtoforge.com/community/threads/server-sent-passive-reply-with-unroutable-address-using-server-address-instead.77274/

By: Marius

 Hi,

Make individual typing   apt-get -y install amavisd-new (Error)

and

make apt-get -y install spamassassin (Errors where encountered while processing:

amavisd-new

E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) )

 

What is this ?

By: till

<p>You probably missed setting up the server hostname correctly when amavis is not starting (command hostname -f must return the FQDN hostname like server1.example.com).</p>

By: Anzola

Is there something similar to this tutorial for a multi-sites configuration? Thanks!!

By: Wesley

Olá meu certificado ssl ficou como invalido. Como resolver? 

By: smza

Is it possible to configure PowerDNS rather than bind9 with ISPConfig?

By: Deepak

Hi, In STEP 15, is it necessary to run ln -s /usr/share/roundcube /usr/share/squirrelmail ?

How can I keep the /webmail only and no /SquirrelMail?

I simply want to open webmail by using /webmail and it should point to /roundcube.

By: Troy

MySql

nano /etc/mysql/my.cnf [...] # Instead of skip-networking the default is now to listen only on # localhost which is more compatible and is not less secure. #bind-address = 127.0.0.1 [...]Is this a error in the script there's no bind-address found in this file?

By: emplant2000

running on 18.04 EC2 Installed following. https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/perfect-server-ubuntu-18-04-nginx-bind-dovecot-and-ispconfig-3/2/ and update git-stable. like this one. http://giantrecycle.jp/wordpress/wp-admin/setup-config.php I can get wp setup.but goes an error by websocket. 2019/05/25 16:14:11 [error] 21263#21263: *2 recv() failed (104: Connection reset by peer) while reading response header from upstream, client: 114.163.233.89, server: giantrecycle.jp, request: "GET /wordpress/wp-admin/setup-config.php HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://unix:/var/lib/php7.2-fpm/web3.sock:", host: "giantrecycle.jp" and websocket says ubuntu@ip-172-31-42-78:~$ netstat -a --unix | grep php unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 22528 /run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 22522 /var/lib/php7.2-fpm/web1.sock unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 22526 /var/lib/php7.2-fpm/web3.sock unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 22518 /var/lib/php7.2-fpm/apps.sock unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 22520 /var/lib/php7.2-fpm/ispconfig.sock unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 22524 /var/lib/php7.2-fpm/web2.sock ubuntu@ip-172-31-42-78:~$ ] ]: command not found how can i fix this isshue?

By: Sasni

Hello, i create php file with phpinfo(); and output is: 

No input file specified. 

Can you help me? 

By: lewis

Whewr is the admin user you mentioned?

By: till

The ISPConfig installer showed you the password of the admin user during installation. If you missed to note it down, then you can reset the password like this: https://www.faqforge.com/linux/controlpanels/ispconfig3/how-to-reset-the-administrator-password-in-ispconfig-3/

By: Mike

I have followed the directions of this tutorial and receive the following error message when ISPCONFIG is installed:

"Failed to reload php7.0-fpm.service: Unit php7.0-fpm.service not found."

The ISPCONFIG panel is not accessible with a "502 Bad Gateway" error message. The NGINX error log states:

2019/07/06 13:08:31 [crit] 20928#20928: *27 connect() to unix:/var/lib/php7.0-fpm/ispconfig.sock failed (2: No such file or directory) while connecting to upstream, client.

By: till

It should read 7.2 in the paths and not 7.0. Please run these commands as root:

cd /tmp wget http://www.ispconfig.org/downloads/ISPConfig-3.1.13p1.tar.gz tar xvfz ISPConfig-3.1.13p1.tar.gz cd ispconfig3_install/install php -q update.php

and choose to reconfigure services during update and check if it works then.

 

 

By: mike

Same results.

"Failed to reload php7.0-fpm.service: Unit php7.0-fpm.service not found."

By: mike

Reconfigure Services? (yes,no,selected) [yes]:

 

Configuring Postfix

Configuring Dovecot

Configuring Mailman

Configuring Spamassassin

Configuring Amavisd

Configuring Getmail

Configuring BIND

Configuring Pureftpd

Configuring nginx

Configuring Apps vhost

Configuring Jailkit

Configuring Database

Updating ISPConfig

ISPConfig Port [8080]:

 

Create new ISPConfig SSL certificate (yes,no) [no]:

 

 

 

Reconfigure Crontab? (yes,no) [yes]:

 

Updating Crontab

Restarting services ...

Failed to reload php7.0-fpm.service: Unit php7.0-fpm.service not found.

Update finished.

By: till

Then do this instead:

 

cd /tmp

wget http://www.ispconfig.org/downloads/ISPConfig-3.1.13p1.tar.gz

tar xvfz ISPConfig-3.1.13p1.tar.gz

cd ispconfig3_install/install

php -q uninstall.php

php -q install.php

Somehow the installer categorized your OS as a different Ubuntu or Debian versionthat uses PHP 7 and not 7.2.

By: Mike

Same results.

 

writing RSA key

 

 

Configuring DBServer

Installing ISPConfig crontab

Installing ISPConfig crontab

Detect IP addresses

Restarting services ...

Failed to reload php7.0-fpm.service: Unit php7.0-fpm.service not found.

Installation completed.

 

By: till

Really strange, either you don't use Ubuntu 18.04 or there is something wrong with the Ubuntu files which contain the os information. Please make a new thread in our support forum https://www.howtoforge.com/community/forums/installation-configuration.27/ for your install problem and there post the result of the commands:

cat /etc/issue

cat /etc/os-release

By: Angel245
By: Tadek

 Can you tell us how to : "I will create a new MySQL user with the name "admin" here which has root privileges."

By: till

That's not needed anymore, the sentence was left from an older version of the guide. I removed it now.

By: Tadek

NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID

When i open https://server1.xyz.com:8080/

how to fix this? 

By: fperera123

Very Clear! and important tutorial. Thank you very much!!!

By: Faizan

will it work for older versions as well? Ubuntu is my favorite operating system and thanks for this article.

Thanks

By: Miguel

Thanks for this amazing tuturial, I need to add brotli support to nginx, but I have not been able to achieve it using the official ubuntu repo version of nginx, if I intall it from the nginx version, it works, but I have to create the virtual hosts manually because ISPconfig create the files on the sites-available folder instead of conf.d. Is there a way to fix this?

By: A_dm

What challenges would you think will happen updating this to 20.04 coming in April? 

By: Steffen

I know and hope that the next Perfect Server - Tutorial with Ubuntu 20.04 is about to come soon, but there is a problem I found and think this can maybe save time for the one or the other.I tried to and finally suceeded with updating Roundcube manually to v 1.4.8. In Ubuntu 18.04 it is still 1.3.6. The problem I found is that you use /usr/share/ as root in the nginx Directives field. It works but I think this is wrong. It must be /var/lib/. Otherwise the manual upgrade will end up with a error 500 because of not finding the logs directory in /usr/share/. Maybe you can change this.

By: Chad

Any timeframe on a Ubuntu 20.04 and ISPConfig 3.2 Perfect Server setup walkthrough?

By: yesmer

hello Till, i have a question so i am trying to install ispconfig on ubuntu 20 but i have problems with the email i cannot send and receive so can i send you or post the issues? thanks

By: yesmer

hi another question if i want to install nginx after of this installation can i can deleted apache after or  can i keep both?

 

thanks

By: till

@yesmer: you will have to remove apache if you want to use nginx. If you don't have any sites on the server, then it might be easier to reinstall it using the nginx perfect server guide instead.
Regarding your email problem, please take care to use the Ubuntu 20.04 perfect server guide and if you have any issues, please make a post in the ISPConfig support forum here at howtoforge, so we can help you to find out what's wrong with your setup.

By: derek wildstar

I have been able to observe that fail2ban from the logs does not block attacks, and I have seen that it is a problem that persists even on ubuntu 20 despite the guide written to insert in the file [suffix] enabled = true port = smtp filter = suffix logpath = /var/log/mail.log maxretry = 3 I tried to double check if I had done everything ok and the result was always the same lots of unblocked login attempts warning: unknown [xx.xx.xx.xx]: SASL LOGIN authentication failed: connection lost to the authentication server Jan 4 01:57:24 postfix / smtpd mail [13507]: warning: unknown [xx.xx.xx.54]: SASL LOGIN authentication failed: UGFzc3dvcmQ6 Jan 4 01:57:50 postfix / smtpd mail [13099]: warning: unknown [xx.xx.xx.54]: SASL LOGIN authentication failed: UGFzc3dvcmQ6 Jan 4 01:57:57 postfix / smtpd mail [13507]: warning: unknown [xx.xx.xx.54]: SASL LOGIN authentication failed: UGFzc3dvcmQ6 Jan 4 01:58:18 postfix / smtpd mail [13099]: warning: unknown [xx.xx.xx.54]: SASL LOGIN authentication failed: UGFzc3dvcmQ6 Jan 4 02:00:10 postfix / smtpd mail [13387]: warning: unknown [xx.xx.xx.54]: SASL LOGIN authentication failed: UGFzc3dvcmQ6 Jan 4 02:00:27 postfix / smtpd mail [14071]: warning: unknown [xx.xx.xx.54]: SASL LOGIN authentication failed: UGFzc3dvcmQ6 the only way was to add a filter not present in file2ban I created the fil /etc/fail2ban/filter/postfix-sasl.conf and entered this [INCLUDES] before = common.conf [Definition] _daemon = postfix / smtpd failregex = ^% (__ prefix_line) swarning: [-._ \ w] + \ [<HOST> \]: SASL (?: LOGIN | PLAIN | (?: CRAM | DIGEST) -MD5) authentication failed (: [A - Za-z0-9 + /] * = {0,2})? \ S * $ and in /etc/fail2ban/jail.local I entered the rule [sasl] enabled = true port = smtp, smtps filter = postfix-sasl logpath = /var/log/mail.log maxretry = 2 if this is not done, the IPs that try to make brute force attacks are not blocked. I think you should upgrade to the guide, as it is quite critical I hope it was useful Hello!

By: Trond

I am installing this on an EC2 instance and if you remove apparmor you also remove snapd and also a aws system program. Therefor you should perhaps not remove / uninstall apparmor.

Also: the quota is a bit strugling because the setting in fstab-file looks different.

By: Trond Husø

When installing mail and such. install everything except Spamassasin first. Do a reboot. Then install spamassasin. This specifically on a small box. I have experienced timeouts when installing all programs on that line.

By: Ahmad Sobandi

Failed to install Jailkit 

wget http://olivier.sessink.nl/jailkit/jailkit-2.19.tar.gz

tar xvfz jailkit-2.19.tar.gz--2021-03-15 07:46:42--  http://olivier.sessink.nl/jailkit/jailkit-2.19.tar.gz

Resolving olivier.sessink.nl (olivier.sessink.nl)... 95.97.76.243, 2001:470:1f14:4ab::2

Connecting to olivier.sessink.nl (olivier.sessink.nl)|95.97.76.243|:80... failed: Connection timed out.

 

Connecting to olivier.sessink.nl (olivier.sessink.nl)|2001:470:1f14:4ab::2|:80... failed: Network is unreachable

By: till

That#s not a problem with the tutorial. Either your system has a problem with its internet connection or the download server of the jailkit project was temporarily down.

By: Pedro

I'm getting the message:

CONFIGURATION ERROR config.inc.php was not found. Please read the INSTALL instructions!   The file is present, I have no idea of what is going on.

By: Javier Vasquez

I set Up ispconfig on ubuntu 18.04 , everything goes well until

the step 

nano /etc/fstab

it shows this

 

/tmp /var/tmp none rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,bind 0 0

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs size=1G,nodev,nosuid,noexec 0 0

tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec 0 0

Where do I put

usrjquota=quota.user,grpjquota=quota.group,jqfmt=vfsv0 0 1

Thank you 

By: Randy

Is it possible to use memcached with ispConfig and multiple Php version? 

I've installed memcached and php-memcached on my ubuntu 18.04 perfect server setup using ispConfig 3.2.2. When I run systemctl status memcached it reports that memcached is running on port 11211 on ip 127,0,0,1 (localhost). But php reports that memcached can't be found. I am running php7.4 on this site but have versions 5.6, 7.0-7.4, and 8.0-8.2 installed per the Howto for installing multiple php versions. I believe the issue is with using multiple php versions. But I could be very wrong here... Any help would be greatly appriciated! 

By: till

You can use Memcached from any php version or application on this server. Just take care that you also installed the PHP Memcached extension for that specific PHP version. If you need further help, please post in the forum: https://forum.howtoforge.com/#ispconfig-3.23

By: Shahin

Hello

Can I use ubuntu 20.04 with nginx and php and others?

Or Nginx must be installed on Ubuntu 18.4

By: till

Sure, you can use Ubuntu 20.04 or 22.04, see installation guide for these newser versions: https://www.howtoforge.com/ispconfig-autoinstall-debian-ubuntu/

By: Chukwu-Nonso

Hello, please kindly help, i succeeded in installing everything fine, but the webmail is giving the following error

 

CONFIGURATION ERROR config.inc.php was not found.Please read the INSTALL instructions!