Couple of PreSale Questions

[ajfletcher]

I am in the process of setting up a new CentOS v5.5 server and I am interested in cPanel but wanted to ask a couple of questions.

1. It looks like cPanel needs to be installed on a fresh copy of a server before any packages or changes are made beyond the basic setup? So I would not attempt to install cPanel on a production server?

2. What happens if after I run cPanel and a server goes into production and for some reason I decide I do not want to use cPanel anymore? Does this impact the operation of the server if cPanel is removed? Does the server have to be installed with a clean copy of the Operating System?

 

[JaredR.]

1. cPanel must be installed on a clean server that is not in production. Additionally, the server should not have the Web Server, FTP Server or Mail Server yum groups installed, and should not have X Window installed. The cPanel installer script will install all of the services that are required. A server that is to have cPanel installed needs to have the bare minimum OS installed, with only SSH access and a working yum (on CentOS or Red Hat; FreeBSD uses ports and packages).

2. There is no provision for uninstalling cPanel. It modifies too many files and services for an uninstall to be successful. The only way to uninstall cPanel is to reformat the hard drive and reinstall the operating system.

 

[Spiral]

1. It looks like cPanel needs to be installed on a fresh copy of a server before any packages or changes are made beyond the basic setup? So I would not attempt to install cPanel on a production server?

To put simply -- Yes, you need a clean empty server.

Technically, an existing production server can actually be converted directly to Cpanel but that is something that requires very much extreme expert level skills and I really wouldn't recommend anyone trying or even attempting to do any of that other than myself alone.

2. What happens if after I run cPanel and a server goes into production and for some reason I decide I do not want to use cPanel anymore? Does this impact the operation of the server if cPanel is removed? Does the server have to be installed with a clean copy of the Operating System?

Never going to happen!

I've worked deeply with every major hosting controller environment and Cpanel for all it's quirks is by far the best as well as the most intuitive.