> In a successful deployment, a ldap "admin" user is created. (not in OS users files). But I don't think this user is used by any services. So I would think it won't break anything if it's removed.

Thanks Andy, perhaps the devs might want to think about removing the LDAP software, at least from the simplex controller. The less complication the better, I think.

I did work out why it was failing, dodgy network settings were the issue.  If anyone else comes across this issue then my solution was to start all over again and ensure that network interfaces all came up correctly and with the correct IP addresses once the VM had started up but  before I configured the localhost.yml file.

I basically replaced step 3 with manual commands to configure the interfaces, assign their IPs and make sure that they all worked.