After posting there seems to be 2 issues.
- the config location sometimes needs to be set to the correct location of SASL
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS upgrade
granted this was after an upgrade. - This one in the thread seems a new one so might not be a pattern where the SASL and SSH were not starting. After reading the top, I am not sure if it was a fresh install as he said “I re-installed virtuamin” but this might just be lost in translation as it was a new VPS server.