Admin GUI stuck on "Please Wait" when trying to login

rt050

Hi All,

I had to move my mailcow instance to a new server as it was running on a very unstable server.

I copied across my containers, data etc.

The containers all start fine, I can login to SoGo, send and receive email etc but I cannot access the admin panel as, once I enter the credentials, the login button just sits at saying “Please Wait”. It’s at that stage I’d expect to see the 2fa prompt but this doesn’t happen either.

Would anybody have any ideas what this might be?

I did try to see if an update would solve the issue but that then broke things a little bit more by not being able to login to the admin panel and reqesting /Sogo forwarded back to the admin gui.

esackbauer

Sounds like you did not use the official way to move the server?
https://docs.mailcow.email/backup_restore/b_n_r-coldstandby/

rt050

My problem was, the vm was so unstable (boot partition had corrupt so had to rebuild it first) and it was running so slow that I installed a blank version of mailcow on the new server, shutt down the old server, mount the vmdk from the old server to the new server, and rsync the containers that way.

It was quite a lot of data to move and doing it this way was probably the quickest way to get back online.

I can’t see how this would be a problem?

esackbauer

You could try to figure out in the logs what is wrong or missing.
Also have a look at the script itself, it would show you steps you might have missed.
You don’t have a proper backup it seems. No backup, no pity.
Syncing containers without properly registering them seems also problem. You hopefully did not sync the containers, but only the volumes.
Even then you might end up with a version mix (new containers, and old incompatible data/database in the volumes), which could be the reason for your errors.

You could also try to reset the admin 2fa:
https://docs.mailcow.email/troubleshooting/debug-reset_pw/

Also be aware that when you reinstalled mailcow with a newer version admin portal has a new URL:
https://docs.mailcow.email/getstarted/install/#start-mailcow

rt050

Which logs would you recommend looking at?

Well the backup is the ironic thing. I run a Veeam server with VM backup, replication and off-site sync to S3 but it was Veeam which caused issues originally where it did not clear it’s snapshots so after a large amount of snapshots that I couldn’t clear, I consolidated them into a new VMDK via ESXi CLI a few weeks ago. This got me back up and running but it was not the best. I rebooted on Friday and it was then where it booted to emergency mode and I found I had a corrupt boot partition, So it’s all been a right mess really.

I used these commands to copy over the data:

rsync -aH --progress /mnt/old_vm/opt/mailcow-dockerized/ /opt/mailcow-dockerized/ rsync -aH --progress /mnt/old_vm/var/lib/docker/volumes/ /var/lib/docker/volumes/
I did try to disable 2fa, I might try it again but this morning, even trying to release a spam email is presenting the same “Please Wait” with the release button.

I wasn’t aware the new version had different URLs, does the SoGo login now look the same as the admin gui login? Was that why I was confused?

esackbauer

rt050 does the SoGo login now look the same as the admin gui login?

There is no SOGo login now anymore. You have to use Mailcows UI to log on. Depending on the setting in the mailbox config, you can direct users to SOGo or to mailcow UI after logging in.
You seem to have left out a lot of updates (including security fixes…)
https://mailcow.email/posts/2025/release-2025-03/

rt050

I have indeed. It’s my bad entirely!

I’ll try re-running the update.

Thanks for your help so far!

Update solved the issue. I hadn’t realised the login GUI for SoGo and the URLs had changed.

Thanks for your help!

Update solved the issue. I hadn’t realised the login GUI for SoGo and the URLs had changed.

Thanks for your help!