CPanel has included support for MySQL 5 in all its latest releases - 10.8.2-xxx – (Stable/Release/Current). I find this very cool and it is a big difference in trying to get MySQL4 to run on Plesk for example. Anyway the upgrade process is very simple, and probably no one will need any additional information to complete this safely. I just wanted to point out some of the problems you might encounter in performing this upgrade.
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This is just a short note showing how you can add a range of IPs in Cpanel/WHM accompanying my previous post “Linux Tips: How to quickly bind a range of IPs on RedHat based systems“.
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After a long time being supported only as beta (and this by CPanel meaning no support at all), CPanel is finally offering full support for PHP5 on all its latest versions – 10.8.2 – (Stable/Release/Current). I have been using PHP5 on some CPanel servers for a long time without any problems, but now probably they will push towards making this the default choice. Still PHP 4.4.2 is the default version that CPanel will install, but I assume that this will change soon. So it might be a good idea to try to upgrade to PHP5 (or start updating your applications to work on PHP5 as this will soon be needed).

We can choose from various versions of PHP5: 5.0.4, 5.0.5, 5.1.2, 5.1.4… Hmm I feel that they could have added some more . My choice was (as I assume most of the peoples will do) the latest version available PHP 5.1.4… Anyway I have not seen any problems on the servers I am using php5 (centos/rhel) besides some application incompatibilities that are being worked on by the developers.

To upgrade your CPanel to PHP5 just use the regular buildapache method. For more details you can see my previous post: “Upgrade php on CPanel/WHM”.

The default PHP installation in CPanel might not be enough for all of us. We might need to add some php modules or just to upgrade to a new PHP version. On a CPanel server the best way to do this is from inside CPanel itself. If possible, we would not want to mess with the CPanel installation and do something manual that might break CPanel.

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Working on a fresh installed Centos server with CPanel (stable release 10.8.2-S120) on it, I have noticed that it didn’t had chkservd running. chkservd is a little CPanel utility that allows you to check from WHM what applications it will monitor, and in case there is a problem with any of those services it will restart it and send a notification to the administrative account. There are other open source projects to achieve the same thing, but I wanted to have this running on Centos as on any other CPanel server (as it integrates very nice in WHM, etc.) because if was much simpler for the client to manage this himself later.

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CPanel is relying very much on perl, and this is why it treats the perl package as a very important one. Many of its internal scripts are written in perl, and this is why it would be best to keep your perl installation in concordance with what CPanel likes .

Normally on a CPanel system you will have perl in the skip list of the update package manager (up2date/yum). The perl installation will be the one from the time CPanel was actually installed, and from what I am aware this will not be upgraded automatically. The latest perl version that CPanel has released is v5.8.7, and if you have an older install than you might have an outdated perl version on your system. Read the rest of this entry »

Today if you will upgrade your CPanel server (running a Stable branch) manually:

/scripts/upcp

you will notice that there is a new version update available: 10.8.2-STABLE_116, that follows up to the Release / Current / Edge versions from the past days (10.8.2-* versions).

In case you update your CPanel automatically, you will just notice the new version installed on the first run of the upgrade cron.

Today if you will log in any CPanel‘s server WHM you will see a big, red notification warning with the following text:

“You are running an insecure Apache setup. You should run /scripts/easyapache or if you are running cPanel 7.1.9 or later (click here) to upgrade to a newer version as soon as possible to avoid your system being compromised.”

I said wow, they have finally decided to move to apache2… But when I checked it out, again a big disappointment… Still apache1, and the upgrade is about version 1.3.16. Nevertheless I have done the upgrade on all the CPanel servers I mange (some Stable, most of them running the Release version) and all went smooth without any problems.

The upgrade will update the following:
Apache 1.3.36 -> 1.3.36
FrontPage 5.0.2.2635 -> 5.0.2.2635.SR1.2
mod_ssl 2.8.25 -> 2.8.27

So accordingly to CPanel notification you should go ahead and complete this upgrade as soon as possible.

As seen in the CPanel forums many peoples had problems with this upgrade, so use it with care. I had not encountered any problems myself (Centos4 and RHEL3/4 servers with Stable and Release). Still in case you do this and encounter any problems, open a support ticket with CPanel support.
In my opinion they should hide that big red warning until they fix the problems many peoples had. Obviously many peoples will click on that once they see it.
You have been warned!

Lately I have seen that on all new server deployed by some major datacenters they fail to install Fantastico even if they state that the license for Fantastico is included with their CPanel package (seen on ThePlanet last week on a new server for example). Why would they do that? I assume that their automated installation scripts are not updated after Fantastico installation method has changed (but this was several months ago). Anyway this is not at all a big issue and as long as they have licensed the server IP (as they have in all the situations I have seen), the installation is very simple.

Here is a what needs to be done… SSH to your server and enter following commands:

cd /usr/local/cpanel/whostmgr/docroot/cgi
wget http://www.netenberg.com/files/free/fantastico_whm_admin.tgz
tar -xzpf fantastico_whm_admin.tgz
rm -rf fantastico_whm_admin.tgz

Now go to WHM, login as root and follow the link WHM -> Add-Ons -> Fantastico De Luxe WHM Admin (one of the lasts entries depending on your setup). There you complete the installation by following the online screens. If you will receive a license error and you are sure that your package includes Fantastico, then contact your datacenter technical support and have them license the server IP.

This of course if you want to allow your users to use Fantastico. If you don’t need Fantastico, then better don’t install it, even if you have it included in your CPanel package. Try to install on any server only the things that you need and use, and leave the others disabled or even better not installed.