Exim Privilege Escalation in 4.69-23

The cPanel security team found an issue in Exim that can potentially allow a user on the system to potentially run commands as the root user. Luckily, cPanel has already released a patch which is available for immediate download via their Exim upgrade script. If your system is set to update cPanel automatically, you may…

Read more

Nasty Kernel Exploit in the Wild

I love waking up in on a nice Saturday morning to find out that one of my servers was rooted. A two-year-old kernel issue in Redhat distributions has surfaced in the form of a nasty exploit byAc1db1tch3z. Basically, a 32-bit binary is compiled and loaded to the server, and when run by any users (even…

Read more

Installing ClamAV on a cPanel Server

ClamAV is an popular open source anti-virus toolkit for *nix, and while many people don’t find much value in using antivirus software on Unix, it is very useful for email scanning. cPanel’s implementation allows end users to run scans on their home folders, public FTP folders, mail, and public_html. It’s really hard to install ClamAV…

Read more

Mass Change Default (Catch All) Addresses

I wrote this nice one-liner for a user in the cPanel forums asking how to change all their current default addresses to :fail: – http://thecpaneladmin.com/files/changedefaultaddr.sh.txt Before you do anything like this, you should back up /etc/valiases. Keep in mind also that you can change the default address for new accounts in WHM > Tweak Settings.…

Read more

Dealing With Hacked Sites

This article will not go into detailed technicalities on identifying, troubleshooting, tracing, and fixing hacks. These topics are far too broad to cover in a single article, and is outside the scope of this article’s intent. This guide is to help you, the system admin, come up with a plan to handle situations involving breached…

Read more

Automating Apache and PHP Updates

A lot of hosts that deploy a large number of servers are automating updates instead of running them manually. While cPanel updates can be automated as well, it’s become a common question of how to automate Apache and PHP updates across a large number of servers without having to manually run EasyApache on each server,…

Read more

Installing an SSL Certificate for MySQL

From time to time I’ve had users ask me to install an SSL certificate for their MySQL server. Currently this support is not enabled in cPanel automatically, nor is there an option to use it in WHM > Manage Service SSL Certificates at the time this article was written. However, you can install a certificate manually by following a few simple steps.…

Read more

10 Free Monitoring Solutions to Consider

Server and network monitoring can be crucial to a host’s success. I mean, how embarrassing is it when your customers are aware of downtime before you are? You don’t have to pay big bucks or spend loads of time setting up monitoring for your server. We’ve compiled a list of free monitoring solutions you can use to guarantee minimal downtime for your users, and show customers how reliable your service is!…

Read more

Log in