Cpanel and Plesk Billing

Billing and Support is a very important factor in the growing Web Hosting and Domain Hosting Industry , as well as in the field of Server management. We are currently trying out different billing softwares that can support Cpanel 11 for Linux and Plesk 9.0 for Windows, we are evaluating one product called WHMCS, my colleague asked me earlier to try it out and see what we can come up with, at first try since I am new to the system I was kind of "confused" I got a little excited and decided to check if it can create an account and then if it would reflect via Plesk, but alas! I got a CURL Error Timeout, I have double checked on the server and it has cURL and cURL SSL Installed. We are sure of it. For the next 14 days since we installed this software , we will be exploring more and more to see if this is what we are exactly looking for.

What I wanted to try out before was BillMax, but as experience has it , BillMax is really much of a pain in the neck than of a better solution for billing and account automation. Last time I touched Billmax was 2005 and never would I come across it again , hopefully until they would come up with a better interface that makes it easy to do billing. If any of you guys out there would actually have any recommendations on a Billing Software plus Knowledgebase as an extra, well that would support Cpanel for Linux and Plesk for Windows of course, please do drop by comments. I will be updating my posts about my findings of WHMCS in the next few days.

Cpanel Hangs on Update

Cpanel has constantly evolved throughout its existence, it is giving out updates through upcp feature in command line or Upgrade to Latest Version in WHM, for some particular reason it would hang up when it starts to update, at times it would hang up updating or detecting the FTP version, here is a quick fix that worked for us.

Reason for hang up : RPM database could be corrupted, it needs to be rebuild and run upcp again
Procedure

1. Login to CLI via SSH
2. Kill any /scripts/upcp process or yum or up2date
killall upcp
killall yum
killall up2date
3. you can try getting the PID also by doing this
ps -wef |grep yum
ps -wef |grep upcp
ps -wef |grep up2date
4. Execute a force kill command through kill -9
5. Once everything is killed , go to /var/lib/rpm
6. Execute rm -f __* , this is the rpm database that it builds when cpanel updates
7. Run rpm --rebuilddb
8. Re-run /scripts/upcp --force (--force switch forces cpanel update even if it is up to date)
9. Constantly check http://layer1.cpanel.net for Changelogs

Cpanel Antivirus

Cpanel has been around since the start of webhosting industry, it has helped system administrators and CEO's alike in generating revenues and giving service to their customers, considering about security, I have posted about CSF (ConfigServer Security and Firewall). At this time , we are going to focus on installing antivirus in Cpanel. The antivirus that Cpanel is using is called ClamAV, an opensource anti-virus software capable of having its signatures updated through crontab , first we will go and explore how to integrate ClamAV into Cpanel software. Here goes :

1. Login to Cpanel / WHM
2. Go to Cpanel --> Manage Plugins
3. Click on clamavconnector to install and then click Save, (sit back and relax to watch Cpanel scroll through a lot of data as it installs the software to your server)
4. Once it is installed, ClamAV option can be found under Plugins ---> Configure ClamAV Scanner, in here you can customize and give the users option with what to scan , you can specify whether to scan emails only or web space, it is entirely up to you, a word of caution though , multiple clamav daemons running on the server is quite memory intensive, I would usually recommend this if your system has a 4GB memory or higher , well memory chips nowadays are cheap so ... add away.
5. For your to update ClamAV from time to time , you can login to SSH and run freshclam, this updates the database signatures and keeps your antivirus up-to-date.

Drop by comments so that I will be able to update if there are issues

Installing CSF

Since our new server has been installed, we are very pleased to use this one handy tool (thanks to Chirpy) to protect and enhance server security, introducing CSF (ConfigServer Security and Firewall) , the features are well addressed at this website http://www.configserver.com/cp/csf.html. A very detailed feature rich piece of software that would help system administrators in their day to day task as well as keeping out unwanted traffic. You can specifically choose what comes in and what goes out from your server.

The question that most users and admins asks is how to install it ? Based from experience and with a little tinkering on the software, here is how to install it.

1. Download the software from http://www.configserver.com/free/csf.tgz. Chirpy keeps the program updated, so you do not have to worry about getting the old version or the newer one, the program itself also has an option for an upgrade.

2.

tar -xzf csf.tgz
cd csf
sh install.sh

Next, test whether you have the required iptables modules:

perl /etc/csf/csftest.pl

(csftest.pl will be ran to check if you have the needed modules to load the firewall)

Note : Be sure to disable AFD/BFD firewall if you have them on your server, this can cause unexpected issues.

3. Edit /etc/csf/csf.conf and use your custom rules, be sure to set TESTING=0 if you are done customizing the rules
4. Start csf through init.d /etc/init.d/csf start and be amazed with the results.


I will be coming up with advanced administration including the email notification of the firewall rules.

Yahoo Deferred Messages

We have been getting yahoo deferred messages, though this is only from one domain but we are actually trying to figure out what is causing the problem , I retraced my steps and it occured after I upgraded Exim rules, I still have to examine exim configuration and maybe I missed something, as usual, Exim configuration has been backed up before upgrading it, will be posting the steps once I am done.

Yahoo's answer wasn't helping that much so we decided to make our own investigation and the mail logs are going to tell us a lot of things. One troubleshooting tool that is very handy for us in this case is the CMQ from freeservers, its a free script for mail queues as well as troubleshooting them, though we are still checking on why the change password doesn't work as well.

Have a great weekend guys :)

Plesk launches 9.0 for Windows

We are currently using the Plesk 9.0 for Windows server Control Panel. As we wait for the Cpanel for Windows which will hopefully be released sometime this year, we are currently evaluating our options with Plesk 9.0. Below is my IMHO findings about Plesk :

a. No PMM (Plesk Migration Manager) for us to be able to change Mail servers one day.
b. MailEnable still doesn't support IMAP , which we would greatly need for a server when customers asks for SquirrelMail or equivalent.
c. SquirrelMail is in the additional software page but sadly again , back to (b) , Plesk doesn't have IMAP support unless otherwise you would buy the software from them (*sigh*)
d. Unlike Linux (which is opensource) and we are very happy with our other server to use Cpanel, their scripts / fixes are very hard to run especially on CLI(command line interface)
e. Plesk data file operates on a separate mysql table / database which is much of a hassle when tracing what went wrong on a particular domain / account.
f. No grant privileges for MYSQL unlike Cpanel for Windows were you can choose which privs you want for each database user.


If there are other things that I did not mention, please do drop a comment or two. Feedback is very much welcome.