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.

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 The latest perl version that CPanel has released is v5.8.7, and if you have an older install than you might have an outdated perl version on your system.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.