To reinstall or not

[qisback]

First off, hello.

With pleasantries over I'll try make this as brief as possible.

I already have another WHM system installed on my server and have decided that it just isn't doing what I need, however cpanel looks like it will.

The problem I have is that I already have an installed and configured server in a datacentre with Centos x64. I've been reading around and everything points at a fresh install of the OS, to be blunt I'd rather not do that as it'll require remote hands.

I am quite experienced with Linux and in particular Centos, I just want to know if it is REALLY necessary to start with a clean system.

I've backed the entire system up so no matter what I do I still have my data, it just seems very long winded to have to reinstall that's all.

Thanks in advanced,

To those who find spelling mistakes you have my permission to keep them for free!

[Spiral]

Your post is a little confusing because WHM is the name of Cpanel's administrator interface but I am assuming in your context you mean a competing control panel product out there.

Anyway to answer your question ....

Yes, you really need to start clean!

Cpanel is so thoroughly integrated and tied into too many systems
and may have a lot of others configured differently that you really
need to install Cpanel / WHM on a clean system.

[qisback]

Thanks for the reply.

Yes you are correct in that I meant WHM System in the sense of Web Hosting Management System.

I was really trying to avoid a reinstall, however I'm not really apposed to one if people think it necessary.

A fresh install will only take 30 minutes if that! and as I say I've got a full back up anyway.

Just wanted to see if I could get away with it, because I would have rather tested the system out rather than committing 100% from the word go.

As I say it's not too much of an issue I suppose as we have a system in place for remote installs to the server anyway.

Thanks again for the input will let you know how it goes.

[Spiral]

It is possible to over-install and convert things but I can tell you from experience that it's more of a headache than it's worth.

Best bet really is a clean install.

If you are unsure of things, I'd setup a new server with it and transition over that way.

[qisback]

Fortunatly we have quite a few servers on an internal vlan so I just TAR'ed the entire server and placed it on another server. This gave me an entire restore point if I needed it.

After the back up and a point to onsite staff to switch our KVM plugs over to the correct server I just accessed the server via KVMoIP. Loaded the centosx64 install from one of our PXE servers, took about 30 minutes in all to backup and reinstall.

After a fresh install I kicked off the Cpanel script and an hour later everything was good to go. I copied back the TAR file and extracted it to a tmp directory. Recompiled apache for zend, GD, etc. Enabled ioncube and was good to go.

The only long winded part was having to restore user files and transfer there hosting to cpanel, which because we use WHMCS for the billing system just ment a change to the Server Module making it use Cpanel. Then it was just a case of telling the module to create the accounts on the correct package, which atleast ment it kept the same billing dates etc and just made new accounts in Cpanel.

After all the accounts were made a quick copy back of user files, creation of databases and edits of config files and everything is back up.

So far so good, just setting up the DNS custering.

Only issue I seem to have run into at the moment is server side filtering rule don't seem to work, i.e. I've set a rule up using "User Level Filtering" the rule is
"From" "Equals" "myemail@mydomain.com"
"Deliver to Folder" "./somefolder"

(note those arn't the actual values.)

but the rule doesn't work, I send an email from said email address and it just sits in my inbox rather going to ./somefolder

Any advice?

However other than the filter problem, transfer went without a hitch.

Cheers for the advice, I probly could have just over-installed but as you say more of a headache than it's worth.

[cPanelDavidG]

...
Only issue I seem to have run into at the moment is server side filtering rule don't seem to work, i.e. I've set a rule up using "User Level Filtering" the rule is
"From" "Equals" "myemail@mydomain.com"
"Deliver to Folder" "./somefolder"

(note those arn't the actual values.)

but the rule doesn't work, I send an email from said email address and it just sits in my inbox rather going to ./somefolder

Any advice?

However other than the filter problem, transfer went without a hitch.

Cheers for the advice, I probly could have just over-installed but as you say more of a headache than it's worth.

The "Equals" operator is an operator that looks for a precise match. Try using "Contains" instead and see if that works better for you.

[qisback]

changing it from "equals" to "contains" worked thanks.

Another problem we've got is that SPF and domain keys don't work for our main domain.

i.e.
Our server hostname is lws1.maindomain.com
I've created a new user account for the domain maindomain.com

When i login to maindomain.com through cpanel and attempt to enable SPF or Domain keys it just states "Enabled, WARNING: DomainKeys cannot be used because this server is not a DNS server for maindomain.co.uk [?]"

I have created another account for myowndomain.com logged into cpanal using this, enable SPF and Domain keys and they both work without problem.

Any Ideas?