Hi Joe,

If you are still around. It seems like it's too early for me to be happy.

When I click on "Apply Changes", I get this error message
apache2: bad user name ${APACHE_RUN_USER}

Any idea?

Holy crap, you're running the Ubuntu Abomination! Run for the hills! (Putting invalid syntax into a configuration file for the convenience of a couple of lazy developers is a great wrongness in the force, and shame and scorn be upon them for their evil ways.)

Upgrade to Webmin 1.411, which knows how to deal with this abomination. (Because they were too damned lazy to parse the Apache configuration file, every other administrative tool that knows how to parse the Apache file has to be updated to deal with the garbage they're putting in the file.)

I feel strongly about this issue, can you tell? ;-)

In particular, if I check my envvars file, I see

export APACHE_RUN_USER=www-data
export APACHE_RUN_GROUP=www-data
export APACHE_PID_FILE=/var/run/apache2.pid

Is this supposed to be correct? And is it the cause of the bad user name I see in webmin?

Hi Joe... I am pretty sure I am running Debian Etchm not Ubuntu, because running this:
cat /etc/issue

Shows:
Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 n l

So, the Debian folks have adopted the same horrible practice. Makes a fellow unhappy to know it...as this was one of the reasons I like Debian better than Ubuntu for servers--it's a really bad direction to go in, and if they do it for all of their services, it will become a wholly unusable mess.

Maybe it's not debian's fault... I could have accidentally chown on the wrong directory, preventing webmin from running the /etc/init.d/apache2 start/restart/stop/force-reload commands.

Is there anyway I can check that the file or folder permissions are correct? If so, which folder should I look into?

No, it's definitely not Webmin's fault--this is evil committed by the Debian and Ubuntu folks.

But you'll still need to upgrade to 1.411 if you're going to use that configuration file. No version before 1.411 knows about those variables (which are post-processed by the rc scripts that start Apache).

And it's not your fault, either, in case I wasn't clear. These variables in an Apache configuration file are not normal or valid httpd.conf syntax, but they are a default part of the Ubuntu Apache package (and apparently now the Debian package).

Ok... so if i do a

wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/webadmin/webmin_1.410_all.deb
and then run
dpkg -i webmin_1.410_all.deb

It should work out...
I am also running Version 3.49.gpl Virtualmin. Will this cause problems with webmin 1.410 after I upgrade my current webmin 1.380?

Thank you for being patient with your answers.

No. I said 1.411. 1.410 does not support these variables. 1.411 is a development version.

Older versions of Virtualmin will be fine...but you really should be running the latest version at all times. We don't build new versions for our healt. We build them because they're better--fewer bugs, more features, better usability, etc.