As always, our technical analysts are standing by 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to help with installations, troubleshoot issues and ensure you have a great experience with our software.

cPanel has also hired more staff in the past several weeks to further improve our software and ultimately help our customers to have profitable hosting operations. We have added an additional customer service representative to help field calls from our customers. We have added two new technical writers to work on updating and streamlining our documentation. Another technical support representative has been brought on staff to help our customers overcome any technical issues they may face. On the cPanel Server Suite side of things we have added two new Windows C++ developers. Also, in an effort to maintain a high level of efficiency and functionality in our software we have also added another staff member to our quality assurance department. Quality assurance works on finding deficiencies in our software and bringing them to the attention of our development team for resolution.

As cPanel continues to grow we will continue to add new staff to ensure the smooth operation of our business and software. The ultimate goal is, as always, to provide our customers with the right products at the right time so their businesses can grow.

cPanel support for FreeBSD 4.x will end August 1, 2008. cPanel will
not maintain binary compatibility for FreeBSD versions less than 5.x.
cPanel recommends that all affected users update to the latest
production release of FreeBSD to ensure future compatibility. If you
are unable to update to a more recent version of FreeBSD, then the
system’s update preferences (WHM >> Server Configuration >> Update
Config) must be set to “Never Update” prior to the deadline. Failure
to do so will result in complete loss of cPanel and WHM functionality.

After August 1 2008 and the end of our support for FreeBSD 4.x, you
will not receive any security updates or bug fixes. Binaries and other
files for FreeBSD 4.x will no longer be available from cPanel’s update
servers. We therefore urge everyone currently using FreeBSD 4.x begin
transitioning to updated versions in the FreeBSD 5+ tree.

__________________________________
Mbox & UW IMAP End of Support

In accordance with earlier deprecation announcements of the mbox mail
storage format, cPanel will no longer support mbox as of August 1,
2008. UW IMAP server and cPanel’s cppop server will no longer be
available in future builds. cPanel server owners are strongly urged to
convert any remaining mbox systems to maildir prior to August 1, 2008.
Failure to do so will result in loss of email client functionality.
As always, if you require assistance our technical team is standing by
to help.

"This release cycle is needed to keep our customers up to date and make sure everyone is running the latest and most secure builds of cPanel software," said David Koston, Vice President of Operations at cPanel, Inc.

Please see our cPanel Product Support Life Cycle page for the latest updates.

Memory Usage
———————-

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
—————————————

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
——————————–

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
——————————–

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.

/bin/pwd: cannot open directory `..’: Permission denied

cPanel has built a script to modify the permissions on your /home directories to 0755 in order to maintain full functionality of the system until this issue is corrected by RedHat. If you experience the above error, you can run the following command to resolve the issue:

/scripts/enablefileprotect

The issue has been reported to RedHat and they have promised a fix in the next coreutils update. More information on the report can be found here:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=448446

References:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2007-02/msg00053.html

This marks the third year for cPanel’s technical conference in Houston, TX. In addition to in-depth technical sessions there will be many opportunities for attendees to network with colleagues and peers in the hosting industry. Attendees will also get to meet representatives from some of the best companies currently operating in the hosting industry. Exhibitors include: Microsoft, Cloudmark, Trustwave, Layered Technologies, R1 Soft, The Planet, SohoLaunch, Bob Cares, Cenicola-Helvin Enterprises, and The WHIR.

More information about cPanel Conference 2008 can be found here: http://conference.cpanel.net/