For the sake of anyone checking this thread, be sure that your hostname does NOT match a site you’re hosting on the server or you’ll get this error. I changed the hostname to something else and now the SSL renews as expected.
Alternatively, you could have read the documentation (section: “Fully qualified domain name”) prior to the installation to figure and save yourself time and hassle. Reading – skimming at least – the documentation should be the first task anyway. There’s a reason for them existing.
Since you seem to know this was the solution, it would have been nice if you spoke up yesterday.
Yeah, I missed that however, having set up a few dozen VMs with Virtualmin on them, this has only ever affected me on two VMs but sadly multiple times where the hostname was one of the domains hosted. If you look in the history, this has happened to others plenty with no solution. The error is unclear. I suggested that Virtualmin throw an error if you create a host with the same name as the hostname to avoid this and identify the issue as something other than IPv6 when it’s not related to that at all.
The error in this case was embarrassingly confusing. It’s not usually how we see this problem exhibit. It is a problem, and it is a documented problem (and, it’s not usually our problem, it’s usually most prominently a problem with mail delivery, but it can also have a surprising effect in a variety of other things). In this case, it was kinda our problem, because the way Virtualmin interpreted what it was getting back from name lookups was kinda silly.
So, two things:
You shouldn’t try to virtually host a domain on a system with the same name as the virtually hosted domain, as that’s a conflict that will confuse a variety of services, because now there are two things with that name (in the case of mail, for example, Postfix will try to translate the virtual address user@domain.tld to user@domain.tld, which is nonsensical).
We should handle this specific case better in validation, and should offer clearer advice.
Virtualmin does better than some (major) competitors that allow messing with configs too but don’t provide explanations, reasons, or hints in documentations at all.
Had no clue about your issue. However, it looked like to be avoidable would you have read the documentation beforehand.
