I hope someone can give me some clue about why this happened because I've become very gun shy with Virtualmin now.
Here's what happened. (Setup: Redhat Linux Fedora 7, Webmin 1.510, Virtualmin 3.66.gpl) I was looking through my Virtual Servers in Virtualmin just doing some routine maintenance and decided to delete one of the virtual servers that I was not longer using. This particular virtual server was one of the very first, possibly the first, virtual server I setup in Virtualmin. I don't know why that would have anything to do with it, but I thought I'd mention it anyway. It's been disabled for about a year now and I just wanted to clean house a little.
So I clicked into Edit Virtual Server for that domain, then at the bottom of the page I clicked Delete Virtual Server. The warning page was displayed explaining what would be deleted. I glanced over this briefly but in retrospect, I wish I had scrutinized it more closely, it may have indicated what it was about to do. Anyway it all appeared to be correct, at least superficially. I never expected that it would delete anything more than the virtual server I was editing. I clicked Ok and after a few minutes, it informed me that it had successfully deleted the Virtual Server. However I noticed that Apache failed to restart. Looking at the Apache error messages, it could not find the directories for any virtual servers. I checked the file system and sure enough, the entire home directory from the root level was gone.
Fortunately I was able to restore it from a recent backup, which did not go as smoothly as I expected (but that's another topic).
How did this happen? I assume that somehow the home directory for that virtual server was mistakenly set to the root home directory. I have no idea if this is actually what happened or how it could have happened. Now I'm very nervous about making changes in Virtualmin, in particular I don't think I will attempt to delete any more virtual servers until I understand what happened.
Does anyone have any insight?
Thanks!
Yeah, that certainly shouldn't happen! It's hard to know what caused that though...
I'd normally say file a bug report, and lets work through what happened...
However, the Virtualmin version you're using is over a year old, and actually contains remotely exploitable security vulnerabilities... so what I might suggest for starters is upgrading to a recent version. If it's a bug of some sort that you ran into, chances are it's resolved by now.
However, upgrading will also resolve the vulnerabilities in that version :-)
-Eric