cPanel 11.23.3 RELEASE Announcement

[ericgregory]

cPanel 11.23 introduces a number of exciting changes to our industry leading control panel product. While there are many changes on the backend to cPanel and WHM with the 11.23 release, we’ll focus on four main areas: Memory Usage Reduction, Mail Flexibility and Efficiency, Backups and Transfers, and User Specific Changes.

Memory Usage
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We aimed at reducing the memory footprint of cPanel with the 11.23 release. Two major changes in this area are VPS Optimized and Tailwatch. These changes were discussed earlier on the cPanel blog (http://blog.cpanel.net/?p=37). Both of these changes are part of an overall focus in reducing memory overhead of the cPanel product, a focus that extends beyond just our customers using VPS setups. The end result is a more responsive product that also uses less memory (up to 60% less standing memory usage on a VPS).

Mail Flexibility and Efficiency
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Several important changes pertaining to mail handling and usage are available in 11.23. cPanel 11.23 introduces full support for the Roundcube (http://roundcube.net) webmail interface. This provides a nice modern alternative for webmail users. Also, it is now possible to have Exim send mail using the IP address dedicated to an account. This not only brings in a much requested feature, but also resolves issues with using SPF records on accounts with dedicated IP addresses. We have also introduced a SPF preference in the Exim Configuration editor to enable SPF checking at SMTP time. Running SPF checks at SMTP time, rather than during SpamAssassin greatly speeds up the mail delivery process on your server.

Backups and Transfers
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cPanel account backup and transfer utilities have been greatly improved in cPanel 11.23. In 11.23 when transferring accounts, the utilities use WHM instead of rsync in order to improve speed and deal better with large file sizes. Also, more information about the accounts being transferred is available, such as disk space those accounts are currently using. Also the option to express transfer accounts from other cPanel servers has been added in order to speed up transfers.

User Specific Changes
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In order to meet the needs of users on corporate proxies who cannot access cPanel, Webmail and WHM on the regular ports, a proxy system has been introduced to cPanel 11.23 which allows access to each service through a subdomain. For example, a user can now access cPanel at http://cpanel.example.com instead of https://example.com:2083/.

Additionally, a mechanism has been built into cPanel to notify users of SSL certificates which will expire soon. As it is highly important to ensure your SSL certificates are functioning properly, users will be alerted 30 days before their certificate is due to expire so they have ample time to renew their certificate.

Along with these changes, many products such as PHPMyAdmin which are shipped with cPanel have been upgraded to newer and far more responsive versions in order to improve the domain owner experience.

While the above features provide a great benefit to server administrators and end users, they are only a few of the changes that are brought about by cPanel 11.23. Other changes such as DNS record type support have been documented in the cPanel change log at http://changelog.cpanel.net

If you wish to stay on cPanel 11.18, you should change your update preferences to use STABLE builds only.

[ericgregory]

Reserved for future information

[ericgregory]

cPanel 11.23.3 has been published today in EDGE, CURRENT and RELEASE branches. All of these branches have modifications to DNS zone verification in order resolve synchronization issues after node failures. Those using DNS clusters should upgrade to get a better software experience. Along with this DNS update come a number of modifications to Apache related scripts and templates to improve some nuances of the EasyApache 3 system. Phase 2 of the cPanel Fast Update system has been released. This phase includes upgraded CPAN mirror checks in EDGE and CURRENT that improve performance and shed a bit of precious time from cPanel upgrades, installs and standalone Perl module installs. A full list of changes included with 11.23.3 can be found at http://changelog.cpanel.net

[lynnette]

The update looks good so far. Just one question, in your post it says

a proxy system has been introduced to cPanel 11.23 which allows access to each service through a subdomain

It that something that needs to be set somewhere as it doesn't appear to be working on our server.

Thanks

[lynnette]

Not to worry....I found it

[cPanelDavidG]

The update looks good so far. Just one question, in your post it says It that something that needs to be set somewhere as it doesn't appear to be working on our server.

Thanks

Yes, this setting is disabled by default. It can be found in Tweak Settings as "Add proxy VirtualHost to httpd.conf to automatically redirect unconfigured cpanel, webmail, webdisk and whm subdomains to the correct port (requires mod_rewrite and mod_proxy)"

[mitgib]

Yes, this setting is disabled by default. It can be found in Tweak Settings as "Add proxy VirtualHost to httpd.conf to automatically redirect unconfigured cpanel, webmail, webdisk and whm subdomains to the correct port (requires mod_rewrite and mod_proxy)"

After enabling this feature, all the zone files were updated on the cpanel server, but were not updated on the dnsonly cluster.

"Application for processing dns requests." in tweak settings is blank, making me assume it would have updated on the cluster.

I manually synced 1 domain to the cluster and the feature does work as advertised, but the thought of syncing 1000's of domains is not gonna be high on my list of things to do.

[cPanelBrandonM]

After enabling this feature, all the zone files were updated on the cpanel server, but were not updated on the dnsonly cluster.

"Application for processing dns requests." in tweak settings is blank, making me assume it would have updated on the cluster.

I manually synced 1 domain to the cluster and the feature does work as advertised, but the thought of syncing 1000's of domains is not gonna be high on my list of things to do.

Would it be possible to get you to submit a trouble ticket detailing this so that we may look into this issue? Thanks in advance.

[mitgib]

Would it be possible to get you to submit a trouble ticket detailing this so that we may look into this issue? Thanks in advance.

Ticket #257321

[ptwebserv]

I can confirm this problem. I saw the DNSADMIN process sycing the records, but using webmail.domain.com does not work.

Can you confirm if this is a problem?

Regards,

[mitgib]

Looking more closely, the dns sync seems to have worked, but from talking it through with the techs in my ticket so far, the proxy mods were not applied to addon/parked domain zone files, maybe this was overlooked, but I defiantly can see a need for webmail.addondomain.com based on the type of support calls I get from clients.

[jdlightsey]

Mitgib, that is by design. The proxy subdomains are only added to the main domain of each account. If you want to add them manually to an addon domain you can use:

/scripts/proxydomains --domain=addondomain.com add

You can get documentation on how the tool works with

/scripts/proxydomains --man

[mitgib]

Mitgib, that is by design. The proxy subdomains are only added to the main domain of each account. If you want to add them manually to an addon domain you can use:

/scripts/proxydomains --domain=addondomain.com add

You can get documentation on how the tool works with

/scripts/proxydomains --man

So if I understand the man page correctly

/scripts/proxydomains --user=cpuser add

Will add the 4 subdomains to all domains owned by that user?

[jdlightsey]

No, --user will set it up on the main domain for that account. --domain will set it up for any arbitrary domain (including addons.)

You're quite right that the documentation doesn't make this entirely clear. We'll will work on improving the wording.

[mitgib]

No, --user will set it up on the main domain for that account. --domain will set it up for any arbitrary domain (including addons.)

You're quite right that the documentation doesn't make this entirely clear. I'll improving the wording.

Great, I'd repeat some of the stuff in my ticket, but customers could be watching so I won't, instead I'll just post the feature request Kyle was kind enough to open so this great feature can be completed

http://bugzilla.cpanel.net/show_bug.cgi?id=6797