Bradleyland.net

So here we go again! I am looking around for a new monitoring setup. I install Nagios to take a look at it on my CC box. My CC box is currently running several sites through Webmin/Virtualmin. When I installed Nagios, I noticed that all of my sites stopped working with the exception of Webmin itself and Nagios.

The errors associated with this issue are a standard 403 on the client side. On the server side you get “pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable”.

In my quest to fix the issue, I double checked permissions to ensure that they were correct. They were. I double checked that the apache group existed and was working correctly. It was. I searched high and low for a fix for this issue. I even wrote a support request to the people over at Nagios right before I uninstalled it out of anger and spite (which didn’t fix the issue either BTW). Sadly, about 10 minutes after hitting the send button, I had a thought.

The way that Virtualmin works is to include the apache user in the groups it creates for hosting accounts. It appears that Nagios removed the apache user from all groups except for the one that it created. Good times huh?

The easy way to fix it on a small box is to add the apache user back to the groups for your hosting users. If you have a larger box, go ahead and script it. After you are done getting apache added back to your hosted groups, go ahead and restart Apache and all should be good in the world again.

Oh yeah. A message to the good folks over at Nagios. You have known about this issue for quite some time due to the multitude of Plesk, CPanel and Virtualmin users that have asked about it or related issues. Why don’t you go ahead and fix it? You lost a potential paying customer today because this simple issue has not been resolved.

All done. Ciao all.