As announced in CPanel’s ‘Release Schedule‘ by the 2nd of July all the branches including STABLE will be upgradeable to the new version 11. The second stage will be also finished by 10 July on all branches. This means that by that time if you have CPanel set to automatically update this will happen (or it might have already happened for you, depending on the release you are using - EDGE/CURRENT/RELEASE/STABLE):

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Traditionally CPanel has been using MBOX for the mailboxes storage and its internal pop3 server (cpop). It took them some time to realize that this was not the best solution and to offer a solution to migrate to MAILDIR and courier as the pop3/imap server. This has been available for a while (since Nov 2005) but it was never the default and because of that, not active on so many servers. The process to migrate to maildir is very simple, but it needs manual intervention and the sysadmin to know about this feature.

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CPanel v11 is the latest version of the popular commercial control panel that was released a few days ago. With this new release all their website was also redesigned and now it is looking more like a commercial site ;-)… The site is build around the release 11 showing the new features found in CPanel11:
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CPanel is working to change its look. You can already see a new look on their site (www.cpanel.net) that replaces the old spartan site with a more pleasant and modern look. If you ask me, I never understood why they were not presenting a more professional web site, as if you compare their old site with Plesk website for example, you will see a huge difference. Still the plesk site is much better in my opinion from all points of view but it is nice to see that they are working on this…

Now the reason for this post is not to bring attention to the new look of CPanel site, but to announce the changes that we will soon see on the CPanel/WHM interface on our servers. They are working on a new theme called Evolution that you can already see it in action on CPanel demo site:
http://demo.cpanel.net
There are rumors that this will replace the old cpanel theme X, and many peoples will not be very happy if X will no longer be available in the next versions of CPanel. We can expect to see Evolution soon take over our CPanel in the next release.

If you are using CPanel you already know that its mail server (exim) uses a mechanism to allow pop-before-smtp relaying for sending outgoing emails. The IPs allowed to relay on the server are added dynamically to the file /etc/relayhosts by the antirelayd daemon.

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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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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”.

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.

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.