cPanel & WHM Version 11.34 Released to Current Tier

Nov07
by Ike on November 7, 2012 at 4:13 am
Posted In: Community, cPanel, Hosting, News

cPanel Inc. announced today the release of version 11.34 of cPanel & WHM software to the CURRENT tier with many improvements and upgrades that you, our Partners and end users, had a voice in.

As highlighted in his Keynote speech at last week’s 7th annual cPanel Conference, cPanel CEO, J. Nick Koston, outlined new features that include:

  • A brand new User Interface for WHM, which brings a slick new look and easier functionality, as demonstrated at the recent cPanel Conference.
  • Web Disk support has been updated for Windows Vista, 7 & 8, and Mountain Lion. In addition to the Web Disk support update, we will soon be releasing Android and iOS clients.
  • Email client auto configuration utilities have been updated to support the latest mail clients, as well as added support for Mountain Lion.     
  • Email Archiving makes its appearance in 11.34, so email users now have the option to more efficiently track, store, and access email with our vastly improved email tracking, and message retrieval, to the Mail Delivery Reports functionality we recently delivered.
  • In addition, we overhauled the service monitoring system to provide better notifications, and improved the robustness of the automatic repair feature.
  • New Hooks Management interface built into WHM.
  • Feature Showcase page of WHM will alert you at login to any recent changes made by upgrading cPanel & WHM.

Upon updating or installing cPanel & WHM version 11.34 you will no longer be able to downgrade to a previous version.

For details regarding version 11.34 User Guide, Release Notes, Change Log and FAQ’s, please visit http://docs.cpanel.net.

Click here to pre-register for our upcoming webinar on version 11.34.

To update cPanel & WHM manually:
Log into WHM as the root user.
Click on the WHM 11.32.X (build X) link on the top right corner of the screen.
Click the button labeled Click to Upgrade.

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Exim Update 10-26-12

Nov07
by Ike on November 7, 2012 at 4:13 am
Posted In: Community, cPanel, Hosting, News

At 3am CST, the Exim team released an update to correct CVE-2012-5671. An update to cPanel has been published to provide this update to our customers. Customers with Automatic Updates enabled, will receive the update with no interaction needed. We recommend all customers not using Automatic Updates, update as soon as possible.

To manually update your cPanel & WHM installation, run the following command in a command line:

<br />

/scripts/upcp --force<br />

For more information please see http://cpanel.net/exim-remote-co…-cve-2012-5671/

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The tail Command

Nov07
by Ike on November 7, 2012 at 3:48 am
Posted In: Learn, Linux

The tail command is a very commonly used command to pull the last number of lines from a file.   This is extremely useful when you want to look through error logs to trouble shoot an issue. You can watch a file live or look back as many lines as needed.

Synopsis

tail [OPTION]... [FILE]...

Examples

View the last 10 lines of the error log:
tail error_log

Follow the error log live:
tail -f error_log

Show the last 300 lines of the error log:
tail -300 error_log
or
tail-n300 error_log

 

Common Flags

-f  –  Output the appended data when the file grows

-n  –  Output the last number of lines in the file

-c  –  Output the last K byte of the file

-v  –  Always output headers

Check out all the options available with tail at the full man page

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How to password protect your directory…

Nov06
by Ike on November 6, 2012 at 2:28 am
Posted In: Apache, beta, cPanel, Hosting, How to, Scripts, Tools

If you are running an apache server password protecting directories is fairly simple. There are plenty of generators that will help you generate all of the code that you need to place into your .htaccess and .htpasswd files.  This can be useful to hide content that you don’t want people to yet, or at all. This also allows you to only allow specific people access to certain areas of your web site.

First you need to start by editing your sites .htaccess file. The link below can help you generate the code, but for the most part it should look like this:



AuthUserFile /path/to/your/.htpasswd

AuthGroupFile /dev/null

AuthName Please enter a password to gain access

AuthType Basic

.htaccess password generator

The AuthName is what will display in the password box that pops up when you try to access the protected directory.  Now that you have that you will need to create the actual password file. This is usually named .htpasswd or can be changed to something a little less common as long as you reference it in the .htaccess file.

You can generate the encrypted password for the .htpasswd file by going to one of the generators and putting in the user and the password you would like to use. It will then give you a line that looks something like this:



admin:gj4DiJhygDhgdHt5hu74

Password Generator

Adding this to your .htpasswd file will grant the user admin permission to view that site. I haven’t seen a limit hit on how many users can be added. I imagine that if you add to many it may slow the authorization process down a bit. To add other users just make sure that each user and password are on a separate line.

A tip for choosing the password is that it won’t work with any special characters. This means no $%^&*!@# in your password. It will work with capitol letters and numbers so you can still make a fairly secure password.

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Ping says my server is down

Nov06
by Ike on November 6, 2012 at 2:01 am
Posted In: Apache, CMS, cPanel, Events, Hosting, Performance, System

Ya ever have pingdom or some other monitoring site tell you your site is down? Then you ask your host about it, and they say that the site has been online the whole time?

Your hosts are probably telling you the truth. If you are using monitoring that relies on pings to see if the site is up or not, then you may not be getting 100% accurate information. A ping is not a priority to a web server. So if you server is busy, your server is going to serve the web page instead of responding to the ping.

If you load rises high enough, then your pings will start being rejected or timing out. This isn’t saying you are out of the woods. This may mean that your server is not tuned properly or you need to upgrade as you are pushing the limits of the server. I would have your hosting company check the optimizations of your server software. These can often be tweaked to handle more traffic, or limit the traffic to what your server can handle.

Most servers have some type of built in monitoring software that will help to ensure that your site is online. Cpanel servers use tailwatch and chkservd to ensure that all services are running. They will attempt to restart the service if they find it unresponsive. You may have seen these e-mails about clamd or exim failing. These are the most common services I see fail.

On cPanel there is a plugin called munin that you can have installed via WHM. This is a decent statistics program to watch over your server. It has a bunch of graphs that make things fairly easy to read and understand.

 

It is a good idea to monitor the health of your server as downtime can be critical. However if you are not using the right type of software you may be chasing a lot of false positives rather than working on things that need to handled.

 

What kind of monitoring software do you prefer for your server?

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