Webmin / Virtualmin running php as www-data, is locked out of viewing .htaccess and writing

Posted by Kirill on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Kirill
Published on 2012-04-10T13:45:17Z Indexed on 2012/11/07 5:03 UTC
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I've asked this on the virtualmin forums, but haven't had any help from there.

Recently, "something" happened and it seems that the apache service has gone a bit weird.

What it does: it runs all apache traffic as www-data and sometimes spawns the php5-cgi process as www-data, this is a problem because all the domain users own their directories and default permissions don't let www-data write to these folders (file uploads are dead) or read .htaccess (permalinks are broken in wordpress).

I've googled this for about a week straight now, tried pretty much everything I could find and achieved nothing.

The only thing that I think might actually be the cause of all this is this page: http:// - i.imgur.com/NYW3x.png (got shut down by the spam filter) So I figured if I set it to "default", this might magically start working again, but all it does is "crash" apache (all websites timeout).

I figure it's something to do with the "mpm" module or something, but I can't find anything relevant in the settings to modify for it to work.

Can someone please point me in the right direction?

System info:

Webmin version   1.580
Kernel and CPU    Linux 2.6.35.4-rscloud on x86_64
Virtualmin version 3.90.gpl GPL
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid)

A couple screenshots of top

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