I’ve just run the latest updates on one of our servers and Webmin is no longer running. When I try restarting it from the console via
sudo service webmin restart
I get an error:
Job for webmin.service failed because the control process exited with error code. See "systemctl status webmin.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.
Looking into the systemctl status webmin.service I can see this:
Failed to start LSB: web-based administration interface for Unix systems.
It looks like something is wrong in a rather profound way after running the latest updates.
It turns out there’s some sort of problem when a site has been disabled / deleted, but had a LetsEncrypt SSL key, it remains in the config file when it really shouldn’t.
I also had to reboot the server. A webmin restart did not suffice as it believed there was something still running on port 10000
Further details: Apache did not restart after this.
I believe the root cause of all these cryptic errors had been a partially failed deletion of a ‘virtual server’ account. Although the account did not show up in the main Virtualmin drop-down, it was still there when looking at Webmin > Servers > Apache Webserver > Existing Virtual Hosts.
After deleting it from there Apache was able to restart.