cPanel Guide

[cpanel Guru]

For all you newbies, even WHM/cPanel on a dedicated box can seem like a lot to deal with so here's some basics for this cPanel Guide:

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://sitename.com:2087
- Regular http://sitename.com:2086 and http://yourdomain.com/whm
· Cpanel
- Secure SSL https://sitename.com:2083
- Regular http://sitename.com:2082 and http://yourdomain.com/cpanel
· Webmail
- Secure SSL https://domain.com:2096
- Regular http://domain.com:2095 and http://yourdomain.com/webmail


Backups

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!


Kernel Update

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!

Up2date information can be found here:
http://forum.rackshack.net/showthre...ghlight=up2date

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"


Things to enable:

· Webalizer Stats
· Awstats Stats (Very nice stats program - recommended.
· Spamassassin
· Disk Space Usage Warnings
· The number of times users are allowed to check their mail using pop3 per hour: (60)
· The maximum each domain can send out per hour (0 is unlimited): (250) - This is SMTP only!
· Email users when they have reached 80% of their bandwidth



Things you don't or shouldn't really enable:

· 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)


· 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:
· Backup Status: Enabled
· 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
· Days to run backup (explanitory)
· Remount/Unmount backup drive (requires a seperate drive/coda/nfs mount) - Disabled
· Bail out if the backup drive cannot be mounted (recommended if you have selected the above option) - Enabled
· Incremental backup (only backup what has changed. (**No Compression**) - Disabled
· Backup Accounts - Enabled
· Backup Config Files (not needed to restore specific accounts) - Enabled
· Sql Databases (at least per accounts is needed to use the restore feature) - Per account
· Backup Raw Access Logs - Enabled
· 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


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: sitename.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/sitename.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

[michael]

Excellent guide, many thanks for that, I've added it to my bookmarks.