Mostly Rocky 9.
I know the staff is aware of this but I thought cloudinit was disabled because it isn’t needed by most. Not sure of the details.
cloud-init is a documented issue on Debian 13. You can’t use firewalld with cloud-init. It’s a Debian packaging problem, nothing we can do about it. There are other firewalls you can use, including options that have Webmin modules and have fail2ban support.
If y’all want to talk about cloud-init and firewalls, make a new topic.
I’d like to keep this thread focused on figuring out how to reproduce the problem OP is having. I’ve never seen it on my Debian 12 test installs, but I haven’t done a Debian 12 test install in a long time.
And, we usually recommend folks just use the latest version of their preferred OS. I still recommend that even in the case of Debian 13 with its cloud-init packaging problem. Just use a different firewall, or, if you have the necessary access to safely remove cloud-init, remove it first (but be aware that cloud-init may be required if you are on a VM at a hosting provider, as many use it to configure networking, among other things).
Anyway, I am pretty confident OPs issue doesn’t happen on Debian 13, and I know it doesn’t happen on any of our other supported distros (at least not when I tested last). So, I guess it’s either something unique about OPs system/configuration, or something has broken in Debian 12 since we were last testing there. Unless Ilia knows about changes to how we handle Mariadb password setting during installation, I don’t think anything has changed in that area in some time.
i have faced this problem in other older versions also even on other operating system like centos (which is now discontinued) after that i started using debian. this issue is not related to operating system it is virtualmin problem, i think there is an issue when virtualmin saves updated mariadb password hash in the system but it failed to write. if you dont play with changing root password of mariadb nothing will happen.
cloudinit and firewalld conflict problem is related to debian 13 operating system it is not related to virtualmin. those fight each other. but firewall is more important so i switched back to debian 12. i keep my firewall settings very tight.