For the past few years I haven’t seen any huge changes in WHM/Cpanel although they keep putting out new versions of their software. Recently we upgraded a customer to Cpanel 11 and have seen that this version has some significant changes and new features to watch out for.

Right now you have to be running the EDGE release series to get all of these new bells and whistles:

New LAMP stack

Cpanel 11 has a overhauled version of its Apache building tool, easyapache. The newest easyapache lets you choose between Apache 1.3, 2.0, and 2.2. Native support of Apache 2.0 and 2.2 is brand new to Cpanel despite years of the software being available and stable. The latest stack now is:

• Apache 2.2.4
• PHP 5.2.2
• MySQL 5.0.27

Notwithstanding the newer versions, the easyapache tool is much more powerful. You can choose from a huge variety of Apache server modules as well as PHP modules to build.

New x3 theme

The basic x or x2 theme in WHM/Cpanel has always been very basic and functional with a grab bag of spelling and grammatical errors thrown in. Most shared web hosting providers would quickly replace it, thanks to Cpanel’s extensive theme support. The Cpanel team finally did something about it, releasing their new x3 theme with Cpanel 11. To their credit, a lot of the wording has been cleaned up and improved but I know I still spotted one spelling error in just a few minutes of digging around in WHM.

The WHM theme is functionally the same, just cleaned up and spruced up a bit:

The new Cpanel x3 theme is more impressive. When a new user first logs in to their account, they are presented with a “welcome to cpanel” wizard, designed to bring them up to speed on the control panel:

The welcome wizard is a great idea. It offers basic info on how to upload your website, the concept of paths and the public_html folder, etc. It goes through several steps including e-mail account setup and setting up a catch-all. Personally I think the beginning user shouldn’t be offered the option of a catch-all because of the amount of spam it can let in. The wizard also prompts the user to setup ssh keys for password-less authentication. I was scratching my head wondering who thought that should go into the new user setup wizard.

Web disk via WebDAV

Another new feature that is also included in the wizard allows users to easily setup a folder on their desktop computer to drag and drop files to their hosting account. The wizard in cpanel does a pretty good job of explaining this. Cpanel is using WebDAV with SSL support to make this happen.

Links

• Cpanel 11 New Features [pdf]
• Cpanel 11 Datasheet [pdf]

This is a fairly common error to see on a web server setup with PHP and MySQL:

Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server

The most likely cause for this is that PHP is built with MySQL support, using its bundled MySQL client. The bundled MySQL client is old, version 3.23.x. MySQL introduced a new password mechanism in version 4.1 of the server. If the MySQL server is setup for the new style of passwords, clients older than 4.1 will not be able to authenticate properly.

To see if this is your problem, look at a phpinfo() on your server. Scroll down to the mysql section and check the “Client API version”. Chances are, the version displayed there is not the same as your MySQL server. For an RPM-based Linux distribution, you can fix this by installing the proper mysql-devel package and then re-compiling PHP passing “–with-mysql=/usr” to the configure script. This way, when php compiles it will use the header files for your version of MySQL.

New version 2.2 of popular open-source blog software Wordpress was just announced. Wordpress is the blog app of choice here. Wordpress is freely available, open source, and written in php with a mysql database. Wordpress.com also offers a hosted blog application, in the spirit of the Blogger.com model.

I think the coolest feature in the new version is a Blogger.com import wizard, allowing for a quick transition to Wordpress from Blogger. Blogger is a good service, but doesn’t let webmasters tweak things under the hood like we can, running Wordpress on our own servers.

The short list of what’s new:

Blogger.com importer
Protection from plugins and template edits that will break the site - I’d like to see how well this works!
speed improvements
goodies for developers - better documentation
improvements in API will allow other web tools and applications to update your Wordpress blog for you

Microsoft recently announced a new edition of Windows Server, aimed at customers providing web hosting and web applications. For several years there has been Windows Server 2003 Web Edition, which is a crippled version of Windows Server with a lower price tag for offering simple web server functions. Realizing that this was not a compelling offer for many web-centric companies considering a Microsoft hosting platform, they have created Windows Server 2003 Web Edition Enhanced.

The big changes in Web Edition Enhanced over the plain old Web Edition are higher limits on physical resources and the capability to install SQL Server. Web Edition allows a maximum of 2 CPUs while Enhanced ups that to 4, as well as increasing the max RAM from 2GB in Web Edition to 4GB in Enhanced. Keeping with a web-server focus, Enhanced cannot be an Active Directory controller or print server.

As a Microsoft Hosting Partner, we are now offering Server 2003 Web Edition Enhanced. Feel free to contact us for info.

I read about The BGP Movie in the Internet Protocol Journal. Geekly intrigued, I had to watch just to say I have seen the geekiest “movie” ever. It is actually informative, giving a visual overview of the IP address usage on the Internet from 1980-2004. The movie also tracks ASNs (Autonomous System Numbers) which are mainly used by Internet Service Providers and large networks.

http://www.apnic.net/news/hot-topics/docs/bgp-movie.mpg

Despite the best of intentions … Beware of who is working on your server

We recently launched a new blog landing page, or aggregator page for Getty Images. They currently maintain 4 different blogs: Creative, Sport, News and Entertainment. The blogs run on a dedicated server, each is a separate Wordpress instance. While Wordpress is an excellent blog platform, it doesn’t have the capability to maintain independent blogs from the same backend.

The new landing page was designed so that it would have a maximum amount of content ‘above the fold’ and require minimal scrolling. Being an image company, graphics are very important and should stand out. Each blog snapshot shows a snippet of text as well as a thumbnail of the latest image from the blog. All of this is put together with custom php code along with some Wordpress functions.

With the spirit of tagging, each snapshot displays the most recently updated content categories from each blog. Handy RSS links also allow visitors to quickly subscribe to a blog in their favorite reader for future enjoyment.

See it for yourself.

Recently we did some work for a customer who has been struggling with keeping load under control. The servers run a few websites, and most of the web traffic is for a handful of sites that process lots of short web transactions in PHP against a MySQL backend database. Since each transaction is mostly unique, caching wouldn’t help.

We have heard some mixed reviews of Lighttpd and decided to test it out, since it was built mainly for speed and performance. With only about an hour’s work of building, configuring, and testing, we had a fully functional Lighttpd web server running with PHP running in FastCGI mode. FastCGI offers a way to keep PHP running in memory, independently of each web server process.

In most LAMP environments, PHP is running in Apache via an Apache module, mod_php. In this case, mod_php is loaded by each Apache child process. With all of the libraries and files required, this is not very effecient. FastCGI keeps php processes running on their own, and then php scripts are passed off to it by the web server processes when needed.

We were impressed by the results.

This first graph shows the load averages on one server over the course of several days. The green dot indicates the point when we switched one of the main websites on this server over to Lighttpd.

We just did another switch to Lighttpd on a similar type of server, where most traffic consists of short high-volume transactions. Both servers are running Apache and Lighttpd side by side, with some websites still running on Apache and the high traffic ones running on Lighttpd.