Comment 4 for bug 250847

The thing is that there is no 'status' function in Ubuntu's apache init script. Simply (and falsely) adding this to /etc/init.d/apache2:

        status)
                log_success_msg "Running"
                log_end_msg 0
        ;;

would solve the issue. Of course, that's only proof of concept, not a bug fix.

This problem (non-existing status function in init scripts) is tackled by server team and community for intrepid. More info:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/InitScriptStatusActions