webmin: WebminCore - illogical stuck error messages/breakage

Jamie, hi. I hope you’re following Sourceforge issue 5055.

If not, here is the last what I found.

Can’t locate /authentic-init.pm in @INC (you may need to install the ::authentic-init module)

I have fixed the theme side and it will not run into this error message, however, potentially the core of the issue is still there.

WebminCore caches things heavely from what I can tell. The brakege happened out-of-the-blue for me on both Debian and RHEL. I have made things break on purpose and then reverted back to the working code, but WebminCore still didn’t like it and returned an error.

Removing temporary /etc/webmin resulted in error:

Failed to open /etc/webmin//config for writing : No such file or directory

@jcameron Notice that it’s // - this is incorrect and could be the source of the issue when running things normally (with /etc/webmin in place).

I also did complete deletion and reinstall Webmin on CentOS. After which nothing has been changed and same problem persists.

In short the problem is:

Webmin loads things, shows non-styled login page COMPLETELY ignoring authentic.pm. I can easily reproduce this error with removing authentic-theme/config file OR by going to authentic.pm file and removing semicolon or any other char (breaking syntax). After reload you would see what we experience in [5055], when it’s just stuck but all theme files are correct and there.

Again, the problem is, when theme files are there and things should go the right way, WebminCore still thinks it’s broken.

Jamie, could you fix it?

About this issue

Original URL
State: open
Created 6 years ago
Comments: 18

Commits related to this issue

Add extra check to prevent over-writing of global config https://github.com/webmin/webmin/issues/755 — committed to webmin/webmin by jcameron 6 years ago

Most upvoted comments

I’ve checked in a small fix that will protect against this failure mode. However, it’s still not entirely clear WHY it happens…

jcameron on Apr 22, 2018

Hi.

I’ve also run into this issue today. I’m not entirely sure what the steps were, but I remember adding a new virtual host to nginx using webmin. After clicking Apply changes, the virtual host started working (so the virtual host config file was saved OK), but later noticed that webmin was not working anymore (Can't locate /authentic-init.pm in @INC Perl error).

Checking the /etc/webmin/config file I noticed that its contents were replaced with what appears to be a nginx specific config:

$ sudo cat /etc/webmin/config 
max_servers=30
messages=
mime_types=/etc/nginx/mime.types
link_dir=/etc/nginx/sites-enabled
test_config=1
show_order=0
test_nginx=1
nginx_conf=/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
nginx_version=
stop_cmd=1
virt_name=
start_cmd=1
pid_file=
nginx_path=/usr/sbin/nginx
nginx_dir=/etc/nginx
apply_cmd=2
virt_dir=/etc/nginx/sites-available

Unfortunately I didn’t have a backup of the config file, so I had to uninstall and reinstall webmin 1.870 to solve the issue. Installing over (after renaming /etc/webmin/config to /etc/webmin/config.old but not uninstalling first) did not solve the issue, because the config file was not re-created.

Using Webmin 1.870 on Linux Mint 18.1 (based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS). The working config file after reinstall looks like this:

$ sudo cat /etc/webmin/config 
ld_env=LD_LIBRARY_PATH
find_pid_command=ps auwwwx | grep NAME | grep -v grep | awk '{ print $2 }'
passwd_mindex=4
path=/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin
passwd_file=/etc/shadow
by_view=0
passwd_pindex=1
passwd_cindex=2
passwd_uindex=0
tempdelete_days=7
os_type=debian-linux
os_version=8.0
real_os_type=Linux Mint
real_os_version=18.1
lang=en.UTF-8
log=1
referers_none=1
md5pass=1
theme=authentic-theme
product=webmin

Hope this helps narrowing it down a bit. Thank you for your wonderful work.

tudorminator on Feb 13, 2018