As someone who is very naieve to all of this (and would guess many others might be) the discussion on who/what is to blame is very informative.
As for selecting an OS, that to many is often not in their direct control (is also bound up in a heap of other decisions).
I have to complement Virtualmin again here as it did provide me with the initial heads-up and solution and my initial post here was to give an additional heads-up to others. OK it was a user who initially screamed at me that the whole site was down and I did have to go searching to find out why.
OK I would have preferred Virtualmin to have done the āscreamingā - so it checks and lets me know (and gives me a restart) in Dashboard -> Servers Status but this is such a critical issue (as well as if Postfix was down) that a stronger alert would have been nicer.
I admit it is really my fault. I simply assumed after performing the package updates that as Virtualmin was up and running then the websites would be, so I got on with other life. I should have checked the websites, email, etc first.
I am hoping now that I have done @johnhe 's solution, all will be ok into the future. I also agree with @joe that we should not be expecting Virtualmin to correct the mistakes/whims of the box provider, the OS or Nginx/Apache or what other software we choose to throw into the mix but Virtualmin already does some checks so why not make the negative result more prominent. The Dashboard is great but it is not even the default page and even if it was user has to open Servers Status to know something so critical is amiss.
You can configure Webmin to email you, text you, etc. if a service goes down in the System and Server Status module. You can even configure it to restart the service if itās down, but I generally recommend against that (as mentioned, if you arenāt careful you can end up making problems worseā¦unless the service literally is fragile and crashes for no reason sometimes, restarting just makes the problem harder to spot, harder to troubleshoot etc. and might even cause damage to data, depending on how carefully your apps are coded).
This is all configurable. I thought dashboard was the default already though. What page do you see when you first login as root?
And, you can configure any section in the dashboard to be open by default. And, Iām pretty sure if any service is down it opens automatically.
Thatās wonderful - But have not fathomed it out yet. Nginx is not listed there and could not fathom how to add it. An email would be nice.
It is for Webmin but not for Virtualmin which defaults to List Virtual Servers I also get miffed at when the page at :10000 opens it seems to prefer Webmin (but Thatās Life!)
I donāt know how others use it but I have a browser tab open for each box (and one for the forum) open all day. I can then swap to see the operational state of each with ease. It is only first thing when the page loads that this is in any way irksome. In the scheme of things pretty trivial.
It is always optional and will continue to be optional. (You can already choose to see the dashboard as the default in theme configuration.)
The only thing weāre discussing is what is the default, and my confusion over dashboard not already being the default (because it used to be, at least with the old Virtualmin Framed Theme, and Iām baffled that it apparently hasnāt been the default for the past few years since we switched to Authenticā¦I canāt believe I didnāt notice, but I guess I just switched it on all of my servers and never thought through why I was changing it, I dunno).
I have found a scenario where the solution I proposed is not necessarily sufficient to allow nginx to start on boot.
IF
your server does not know its IPv4 and IPv6 address before starting to boot up, because it is using an āelastic IP serviceā (such as from AWS)
THEN
the network-online.target solution is not guaranteed to work.
You may be using an āelastic IP serviceā without even realising it or being specically told.
I have found the following works:
Add the following two lines into /etc/sysctl.conf
