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Preventing cPanel from managing the web service (httpd) process – Part 1

Part of the core design of cPanel is to install and fully manage the web service process. By default this process is Apache as provided by EasyApache. For various reasons1 a server admin may not want to use that installation of Apache, or even use a different web service. In such situations it is advantageous [...]

Debian does not provide a wheel group

This caught me by surprise. Debian does not provide a wheel group. Apparently it’s because the GNU version of su does not work with the normal usage of the wheel group. According to the info page on coreutils:

22.5.1 Why GNU `su’ does not support the `wheel’ group ——————————————————

(This section is by Richard [...]

rrdtool part another

It appears the path to the rrdtool executable is hard-coded in more than one place. A second location is in /usr/local/cpanel/Cpanel/Bandwidth/RRD.pm. The fix is the same as before:

Change the rrdtool path to /usr/bin/rrdtool Exclude the file from updates: ?View Code SHELL1 2 # echo "/usr/local/cpanel/Cpanel/Bandwidth/RRD.pm" >> /etc/cpanelsync.exclude <

Now on Debian

Due to hardware issues, the migration to the Debian-based cPanel server was expedited.

Welcome to the Debian-based cPanel server.

Fixing rrdtool

When starting cpsrvd or using cpanellogd directly the following error will appear:

Died at /usr/local/cpanel/bin/rrdtoolinstall line 75. No font directories found on the system. Install an X11 font package (such as xorg-x11-fonts-base or XFree86-base-fonts) and try again.

Since my goal with this installation is to use as many packages from a Debian repository as possible, [...]

Installing cPanel on Debian servers

The first step is getting cPanel installed on the server. The cPanel installer will work to some degree. What I did was extract the installer and modify it to my purposes. In particular to meet the following goals:

Skip installation of a lot of dependencies. Most of these dependencies are for EasyApache. I want to [...]

Using cPanel with Debian-based Servers

Using cPanel with a Debian-based server (most commonly Ubuntu) is a popular request via our forum and sales system. As shown in our system requirements page, cPanel/WHM gives you the best experience on Red Hat Enterprise or CentOS. With some work and system knowledge it is possible to install and use cPanel on (nearly) any [...]

Tracing a process as a user

On Linux[*], just because a process is owned by a user does not mean that user can trace the process. By trace I mean using applications such as strace or gdb to peek at the internals of the process. The process must also be dumpable, that is whether the process may generate a a core [...]

SysAdmin Tip: user may alter root-owned files and directories

Here’s a friendly system administration tip, for Linux/FreeBSD/Unix-type systems: root-owned files and directories in a directory owned by a user can still be modified by the user.

The scenario usually presented is that the sys admin doesn’t want a user modifying a certain configuration file in the user’s home directory. Modifying is usually understood as [...]