cPanel Tips

Hello, world! I’m Jason Mathews, the dayshift supervisor for technical support. I’ve been playing with computers since 300 baud and in the industry since 1992. I’ve been a network engineer, systems administrator and all around go-to guy for anything powered by electrons. So I have a lot of personal experience helping customers deal with issues when they arise.

Managing dedicated servers and the associated infrastructure can be pretty complex, and we’re here to help with that.

As an example, cPanel has gone to version 11, and there have been some support requests since the upgrade. This is no slight on cPanel — I’m not picking on them. It’s typical to see some initial discomfort when new versions come out, and usually there are some easy fixes. Since we’ve heard from some customers about this recent version, I thought it might be helpful to provide some tips in our blog to help:

1) Find your current version of Perl. You can do that by typing in:

perl –v

at the command line. Make sure that your servers have Perl 5.8.7 at a minimum. 5.8.8 would be better, and to get the installer package for that, run this in SSH asroot:

wget http://layer2.cpanel.net/perl588installer.tar.gz

tar zxvf perl588installer.tar.gz

cd perl588installer

perl install

This will get perl up-to-date and recompile a whole lot of perl modules that cPanel depends on. cPanel isn’t updating perl directly, and if it’s anything below 5.8.7, many modules won’t work, recompile at all or will provide strange output.

2) Run this script and check the output: /scripts/updateuserdomains

This will read the user files in /var/cpanel/users and make any needed synchronization with other system files, such as Apache and ftp.

Sometimes, however, the user configuration will have conflicts you may not have noticed, mostly by one account having control of a domain while that domain is still active on another account. This inconsistency can cause a lot of trouble later on, so you’ll want to edit the user files directly, remove the offending domain, then run the script again.

3) Verify all of cPanel is updated to version 11.

perl -c /scripts/wwwacct

If this command doesn’t have any errors, then everything should be at the proper version. If you get errors, something might be missing, so run this:

/usr/local/cpanel/bin/checkperlmodules

/scripts/upcp -force

This will double check all perl modules and run the update in force mode, overwriting existing cPanel functions with the latest ones. If this still doesn’t work, let us know, and we can try more detailed fixes, or we can escalate the issue to cPanel directly and they can provide a proper fix.

4) Ensure that you are using the maildir format in email. The previous versions of cPanel used both mbox and maildir formats, but mbox is being phased out, and maildir is much more efficient anyway. To check this,run:

/scripts/convert2maildir

This will tell you what your current mail format is, and offer you the chance to convert to maildir and backup current mailboxes before the change. This script is pretty reliable, I haven’t run across any problems with it. It will install the latest courier-imap to handle the new format. This will also mean that Horde and Squirrelmail will then work with the new format, and Neomail will go away, since that has long since been deprecated.

That’s pretty much it. These are the steps we would follow in looking at any recent issue with cPanel. I would welcome any comments or suggestions for the next posting. If there’s something you want to know about technical support and what it is we do, I’ll write about it.

- Jason

This entry was posted on Friday, July 6th, 2007 at 7:00 am and is filed under Tech Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.