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Location: India
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 Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2003 8:42 pm Post subject: HOWTO: Unofficial Cpanel Newbie Guide |
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I've been using Cpanel for a few months and learnt a few things along the way. I'm not a Cpanel guru but I have my machine running well with it so I must be doing something right !
I'm assuming you already have Cpanel installed......this is meant to be a breif overview of some important features - not a complete WHM guide - that should be the responsibility of DarkOrb - we all know their documentation needs work and updating though!
Logins!
You need to login to your box right well here are a few things to help you.
SSL logins are highly recommended for security.
WHM
- Secure SSL https://yourdomain.com:2087
- Regular http://yourdomain.com:2086
Cpanel
- Secure SSL https://yourdomain.com:2083
- Regular https://yourdomain.com:2082
Webmail
- Secure SSL https://yourdomain.com:2096
- Regular https://yourdomain.com:2095
Cpanel updates
Do not use anything other than stable releases.
Server Setup/Change Update Preferences:
Cpanel/WHM Updates: Manual Updates Only (STABLE tree)
- All set to manual updates.
I prefer manual over automatic because I like to keep a better eye on what has been changed.
If you select manual and you want to perform the update simply scroll down WHM and go to
Cpanel 6 > Upgrade To Latest Version
This will update Exim, Perl, Apache and Cpanel if updates are available - it will only update to the Cpanel release type you selected previously.
To see if new updates are available go to http://layer2.cpanel.net
EG: Latest Builds:
Cpanel-6.4.0-STABLE_16-Linux-i686-glibc-2.1 (Tue Apr 15 12:34:00 2003)
Read your WHM news page to see important release and news information!
Cpanel and the kernel - use up2date
Cpanel can update your system software. But won't upgrade your kernel for you, you have to do that with up2date
Note: Don't upgrade Perl with up2date it will break your Cpanel Perl!
Note: You need to use rhn_register before up2date will work!
"You can use the RedHat Network for free by registering from your system (/usr/sbin/rhn_register) and running up2date from there. Then up2date - l will show the list of available updates"
Tweak Settings:
Anything not listed is up to you
Things you to enable:
1) Webalizer Stats
2) Awstats Stats (Very nice stats program - recommended.
3) Spamassassin
4) Disk Space Usage Warnings
5) The number of times users are allowed to check their mail using pop3 per hour: (60)
6) The maximum each domain can send out per hour (0 is unlimited): (250) - This is SMTP only!
7) Email users when they have reached 80% of their bandwidth
Things you don't or shouldn't really enable:
1) Prevent the user 'nobody' from sending out mail to remote addresses
(php and cgi scripts generally run as nobody if you are not using phpsuexec and suexec respectively.)
(This won't allow PHP scripts to send mail - EG formmail or anything else as they're sent using nobody)
2) Keep log files at the end of the month (default is off as you can run out of disk space quickly)
Backups
Configure Backup under WHM:
1) Backup Status: Enabled
2) Backup Interval (Note: Selecting Daily Backup with give you monthly and weekly as well, Selecting Weekly backup will give you monthly as well.) Daily or weekly - up to you
3) Days to run backup (explanitory)
4) Remount/Unmount backup drive (requires a seperate drive/coda/nfs mount) - Disabled
5) Bail out if the backup drive cannot be mounted (recommended if you have selected the above option) - Enabled
6) Incremental backup (only backup what has changed. (**No Compression**) - Disabled
7) Backup Accounts - Enabled
 Backup Config Files (not needed to restore specific accounts) - Enabled
9) Sql Databases (at least per accounts is needed to use the restore feature) - Per account
10) Backup Raw Access Logs - Enabled
11) Backup Destination (this should be a dir/nfs/coda mount with at least twice the space of all your /home* partitions. Setting this to /home is a VERY BAD IDEA.): - /backup
(Note: you need a second hard drive and should have it set to /backup in your fstab file)
Service Status
System Health and running services - eg Apache, Exim etc.
Green = Good | Yellow = Warning | Red = Trouble
Clients can see the service status through their own Cpanel as well.
Things to pay attention to:
- Server Load 0.12 (1 cpu) - the lower the better!
- Memory Used
Firewall
I have setup APF by Gpan and it works great! The only thing is you need to add 2095 and 2096 to the common ports list because those are your webmail and secure web mail ports!
Logs
No one tells you where they are but it's very important to know
*Important!
All users have their own seperate log files - every domain has their own logs - eg: yourdomain.com
Exim:
- /var/log/exim_mainlog -/var/log/maillog -/var/log/exim_paniclog
Apache:
- Error Log: /usr/local/apache/logs/error_log (404 not found errors, etc)
- Access Log: /usr/local/apache/logs/access_log
- Site Logs: /usr/local/apache/domlogs/yourdomain.com
Logins: /var/log/secure /var/log/logins_log
Messages: /var/log/messages
Cpanel: /usr/local/cpanel/logs/access_log
Other things to know:
Restart Cpanel
/etc/rc.d/init.d/cpanel3 restart
Cpanel Manual Backup & Update - if backup doesn't work through WHM.
cd /scripts/ then do ./cpbackup
cd /scripts then do ./upcp
Apache Config Test in SSH: -test httpd.conf file for errors!
/usr/local/apache/bin/apachectl configtest
- config is located in /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf
Manual Stop - Start of services in SSH: (start | stop | restart)
# service httpd
# service exim
# service proftpd
# service named
# service mysql
That's all I can think of for now! Overall Cpanel is easy to use and has some nice automated features but a control panel can only do so much, you need to get your hands dirty sometimes !
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