Issue Can no longer connect to nginx from localhost

[Wade]

Server operating system version

Ubuntu 22.04

Plesk version and microupdate number

18.0.57.3

At a semi-random time yesterday - possibly coinciding with a Plesk or Ubuntu update (apt full-upgrade) - my Plesk-operated web server became unreachable from localhost. This broke a cron job that was using Plesk's fetch_url against mydomain.com.

Ultimately I've narrowed it down to one of two problems, but I'm not sure which is "the" problem and thus which one to try to fix:

1. /etc/hosts has an entry for mydomain.com redirecting to 127.0.1.1.
2. Nginx is configured to listen only on the external IP address, not all interfaces.

Thus when I run e.g. curl https://mydomain.com from my server, it tries connecting to 127.0.1.1 instead of the public IP address, and Nginx is not listening on localhost, so I get a connection refused error.

I found various earlier forum threads about this issue (e.g. Can't access sites from localhost) but none have any resolution.

I also don't understand why this only just broke yesterday - it was working just fine before that. Alas I don't know what the relevant config files contained prior to this breakage.

As a workaround for the cron job, I was able to rewrite it as curl --header 'Host: mydomain.com' https://<external IP>, which is fine, I guess, although it'd be nice not to have to hard-code my external IP address into a random cron job (in case it changes in future - there's no way I'll remember to update this cron job).

 

[Peter Debik]

(1) --> Remove the hosts entry for 127.0.1.1