Platonic

Today I faced an interesting issue on a HSPComplete box. One of the customer was unable to pop emails from an account. There was no issue with the pop service but I used to get a ERR message after the authentication.

Following is the pop test via TELNET

$ telnet localhost 110
Trying 127.0.0.1…
Connected to testserver (127.0.0.1).
Escape character is ‘^]’.
+OK
user testuser
+OK
pass 123456
-ERR
Connection closed by foreign host.

Log was showing the following message :

Jul 22 22:48:29 testuser popa3d[10007]: Failed or refused to load /var/spool/vmail/testdomain.com/mail/testuser

Here is the pop3d rpm which was found on the server :

popa3d-0.6.4-4.as3.swsoft

Trouble shooting :

Checked inbox for multiple email accounts The mbox file size didn’t affect other email accounts found to be having more emails than this account.

There were no complaints from other customers.

File permissions for the inbox found to be fine along with the ownership etc.

Took a backup of the inbox and emptied it to check if I can successfully login to pop account. That did a trick. But that was not the complete solution.  Customer wanted to pop all his 40k+ emails. I tried to split the mbox file into 50MB chunks, copied the content of the first part to inbox and tried popping the emails. Still there was no luck.

Work around :

While working with the inbox file I found that something is wrong in the first line. I found some content which might have been the subject line of the first message. It means the mbox file is corrupted. When we use mbox format to store emails on the server all the emails coming to an email account will be stored in a single file and the file might get corrupted while popping the emails etc…

I just removed the first email from the mbox file (You can identify the different emails as the email content is stored in plain text and also there will be a line which indicates the beginning of a new message. Its quite easy to understand how emails are stored in mbox file once you look into it) and customer was able to start popping emails without any issues.

You might face this issue on servers using mbox format for inbox. Many plesk, cpanel as well as HSPComplete boxes are still using mbox. Hope this post will help you resolve such issues.

PS: Ensure that you’re using mbox file format. In maildir format you will have cur, new and tmp folders for each account.

Following links will help you understand the MailBox formats better

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox

From : cPanel Blog : Posted: 11 Jul 2008 10:35 AM CDT

One Time License Update

As of today, July 11, 2008, cPanel will no longer be offering One Time Licenses. These licenses are not currently inline with the way we deliver our products and do not allow us to provide the same high level of service to our customers that our other license models do. We apologize for the lack of notice however, providing notice would simply allow for more One Time Licenses to be sold which is the opposite intention of this action. Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause

————————————————————————
Off the cPanel Blog

Final bit:

Looks like all proprietary Control Panels are hiking up the prices big time. Recently “Parallels” (Earlier known as SwSoft) increased the prices for their Virtuzzo licenses. Looks like an effect of “Global
economic condition”.

If you’re a web hosting service provider, system administrator, website owner you got to think about a tool which lets you manage your server and websites easily. Cpanel is one of my favorite control panel for web hosting automation. Cpanel gives a lot of help to system administrator and save a considerable amount of time. Its ease of use and the fresh web2.0 design lets website owners manage their websites easily. On top of all this, Cpanel constantly improves and updates its product features. If you don’t have Cpanel on your servers think of using it, you will find the reasons below. Following gives an update on recent changes happening in Cpanel features.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you have Fedora Core 5/6 or CentOS 5 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on your server and are experiencing troubles with respect to upgrades (forced or otherwise) of Click Be! or Fantastico or Universina, please check the wget version that you have on your server.

If it is wget-1.10.2-3.3.fc5 or wget-1.10.2-7.el5 or wget-1.10.2-8.fc6.1, we suggest that you replace it immediately with an older and/or stabler version. This version does not honor the “-P” switch.

An alternate version that we suggest is wget-1.10.2-3.2.1

You can use the following commands for this purpose.

For 32-bit:

rpm -qa wget ;
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/core/5/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/wget-1.10.2-3.2.1.i386.rpm
rpm -e wget ;
rpm -ivh –force wget-1.10.2-3.2.1.i386.rpm ;
rpm -qa wget ;

For 64-bit:

rpm -qa wget ;
wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Everything/x86_64/os/Fedora/wget-1.10.2-15.fc7.x86_64.rpm ;
rpm -e wget ;
rpm -ivh –force wget-1.10.2-15.fc7.x86_64.rpm ;
rpm -qa wget ;

Note: You must execute the commands shown above as root.

You will also want to put wget on /etc/yum.conf’s exclude= line so the OS doesn’t automatically reinstall the buggy version.

Reports suggest that the version of wget included with Fedora Core 7 does not have this problem, so that may be a better option for some people.

Fantastico is an automated tool for installing forums and other php softwares into your webhosting account via Web hosting control panel “Cpanel”

Here is how you can jump in and do a fresh install / upgrade of Fantastico on a Cpanel Server

SSH to your server(s) and enter following commands:

cd /usr/local/cpanel/whostmgr/docroot/cgi
wget -N http://files.betaservant.com/files/free/fantastico_whm_admin.tgz
tar -xzpf fantastico_whm_admin.tgz

Now go to WHM, login as root and follow the link

WHM -> Add-Ons -> Fantastico De Luxe WHM Admin (scroll down the left menu).

Upon loading, Fantastico De Luxe WHM Admin will auto-update your existing installation (if existing). All admin files (masterfiles, tarballs, settings etc) will be moved to or created at /var/netenberg.

You need a license to run this. So, don’t forget to purchase it
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Cpanel Blog :: SECURITY ALERT

An arbitrary file inclusion vulnerability has been discovered in the Horde webmail application. At present, we can confirm that this security vulnerability in question affects Horde 3.1.6 and earlier. Based on incomplete information at this time, we also believe this affects Horde Groupware 1.0.4 and earlier as well (cPanel does not use Horde Groupware at this time).

cPanel customers should update their cPanel and WHM servers immediately to prevent any chance of compromise. The patch will be available in builds 11.18.2 and greater (or 11.19.2 and greater for EDGE systems). The updated builds will be available immediately to all fast update servers. The builds will be available to all other update servers within one hour of this posting.

To check which version of cPanel and WHM is on your server, simply log into WebHost Manager (WHM) and look in the top right corner, or execute the following command from the command line as root:

/usr/local/cpanel/cpanel -V

You can upgrade your server by navigating to ‘cPanel’ -> ‘Upgrade to Latest Version’ in WebHost Manager or by executing the following from the command line as root:

/scripts/upcp

It is recommended that all use of Horde 3.1.6 and earlier be stopped (on cPanel and non-cPanel systems alike) until Horde updates can be applied. You can disable Horde on your cPanel system by unchecking the box next to ‘Server Configuration’ -> ‘Tweak Settings’ -> ‘Mail’ -> ‘Horde Webmail’ within WHM, and saving the page with the new settings.

We would like to thank HostGator for providing the initial details in their report of this vulnerability.