Webmin seem to think Apache isn't started when it really is, how do I fix this?

Question

I performed a sudo apt-get install lamp-server^ on my Ubuntu 10.10 desktop for development purposes and then installed Webmin. Now, Webmin doesn't seem to think Apache is running when it really is, and if I try to start Apache from the Webmin interface I get the following output:

Failed to start apache :

 :
 * Starting web server apache2
   ...done.

Also, through Webmin, if I try to view the Apache error log I get this:

cat: /var/log/apache2$SUFFIX/error.log: No such file or directory

Whatever is going on is preventing me from using name-based hosting to view local sites. What is wrong and how do I fix it?

Answer 1

As can been seen from the first paragraph of the webmin documentation on the Ubuntu Wiki and Launchpad, webmin is no longer supported in Ubuntu. Instead, users are being pointed to eBox. The same issue was reported on the forums and was determined to be an issue with Webmin that needs to be resolved.

The issue was reported as a bug against Webmin here: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3081423&group_id=17457&atid=117457

The fix seems to be to edit /etc/apache2/envvars, to quote jcameron:

Ok, thanks .. I see the issue now. The fix is to remove $SUFFIX from the lines :

export APACHE_PID_FILE=/var/run/apache2$SUFFIX.pid export APACHE_RUN_DIR=/var/run/apache2$SUFFIX export APACHE_LOCK_DIR=/var/lock/apache2$SUFFIX export APACHE_LOG_DIR=/var/log/apache2$SUFFIX

as it will be empty anyway.

So you have 3 options:

1. Use eBox
2. Patch the file yourself to resolve the issue
3. Wait for the Webmin maintainer to fix the bug and new packages to be released.