Linux System Admins Blog

When using cPanel the way to enable allow_url_include directive locally (per user) is to create an Virtual Host include:
First create an include file:
/usr/local/apache/conf/userdata/std/2/username/domain.com/custom.conf
Add directive to custom.conf:

php_admin_flag allow_url_include On

Then run to enable include:
/scripts/ensure_vhost_includes –user=username –verbose
Alternatively, enabling allow_url_include globally (server-wide) is done by editing /usr/local/lib/php.ini and adding “allow_url_include = On” directive to the Fopen wrapper section.
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
; [...]

[Read more →]

Here’s my quick howto on installing GNUPG PHP Pecl extension (pecl docs) in Cpanel. Please note that this covers only the installation process and no further details on setting up gpg keys or using the function with extension or sample PHP scripts.
Installation process is very straightforward provided you met the requirements like php-pear, gnupg, [...]

[Read more →]

Ran into an issue today where a php created file was unreadable by other users or services that run under a different user. Since this is a software originated issue the sysadmin would love for the developer to change the code to include the chmod() php function to set permission to 644 after [...]

[Read more →]

Here’s a quick how-to for installing ImageMagick and Imagick on Cpanel server. I will cover only the procedure using the Cpanel built-in scripts, although you can also install it the usual way (rpm or source install). ImageMagick is the application for working with images while the Imagick is a PHP extention to [...]

[Read more →]

This is the second time that CSF on our Cpanel server is not detecting POP3 login failures from a dictionary attack. The IP address was added on the ip deny list but still it was able to attempt to login on POP3. We have our LF_POP3D set to 20 and LF_POP3D_PERM to 1 [...]

[Read more →]

This task is very simple and can be done in two steps:
1.)  Login as root and change your server hostname:
hostname newhos.name.tld
Note: Don’t forget to create an A entry for your new hostname, otherwise you will get a popup message during WHM login.
2.)  Issue /usr/local/cpanel/cpkeyclt to update your Cpanel License Key, otherwise you will get Invalid [...]

[Read more →]

Recently, Cpanel implemented their standard way of adding custom changes to virtualhost configuration to preserve custom changes after an upgrade or Apache rebuild.
Here are the two common situations of adding custom changes:
1.)  Changes added inside a <VirtualHost>
This is very simple as we only need to create a single file that will contain our changes.  But [...]

[Read more →]

Looking back it seems like most posts on this blog are helpful tips and not reports of problems we encountered. Not that we don’t have any problems but we mostly report our solutions instead of the actual problems. Of course now and again a problem comes along that doesn’t have a solution ready to copy-paste [...]

[Read more →]

After rebuilding Apache in CPanel using easyapache or WHM there are many things that can go wrong even if you use a stable branch of CPanel. For example Tomcat that was installed from CPanel can fail after the build and even if this might look unrelated to the apache build this can happen quite frequently.

[Read more →]