Cpanel Service Emails

From CyberWurx Customer Wiki

Revision as of 17:10, 28 May 2008

May 28, 2008

cPanel 11.23 RELEASE Announcement

NOC:

You are receiving this communication because you are listed as the
tech contact for Cyber Wurx, LLC.

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.

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.





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May 2, 2008

NOC:

You are receiving this communication because you are listed as the
tech contact for Cyber Wurx, LLC.

Several potential security issues have been identified with cPanel software and Horde, a 3rd party bundled application. cPanel releases prior to 11.18.4 and 11.22.2 are susceptible to security issues, which range in severity from trivial to medium-critical. Along with the discovery of these potential issues, cPanel has released a new security tool to provide users with protection from XSRF attacks.



Update Advisory
==============================
All STABLE and RELEASE users are strongly urged to update to their respective 11.18.5 release. CURRENT and EDGE users should update to the latest 11.22.3 release. No releases are deemed susceptible to severe, critical or root access vulnerabilities.


XSRF Protection
==============================
cPanel has also introduced a tool designed to protect against a category of attacks known as cross-site request forgery (XSRF). This tool will validate the browser referrer information against an approved list of domains.

The list of approved domains is automatically determined according to the system's configuration. Any blocked requests are presented to the end user for approval. This additional step will minimize disruption of workflow while protecting the user from an outside XSRF attack. This check will not prevent bookmarked links in modern browsers from working normally.

XSRF protection is not enabled by default. It is controlled via WHM's Tweak Settings under the Security heading. The protection may also be enabled manually by adding the following line to the end of /var/cpanel/cpanel.config:

referrersafety=1

and restarting cpsrvd by executing /usr/local/cpanel/startup.


Credits
================================
cPanel Security Auditing
Jeff Petersen ( Myriad Network )
Cassidy B. Larson ( InfoWest, Inc. )
Bugtraq ( http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/491230 )
Matteo Carli
Linux_Drox





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March 10, 2008

NOC:

You are receiving this communication because you are listed as the
tech contact for Cyber Wurx, LLC.

Summary:
The Horde webmail application framework has been updated to 3.1.7. Upgrades have
been made in cPanel's PHP application security model.

Description:
The Horde webmail application framework has been updated to 3.1.7 for the official
fix to the previously announced arbitrary file inclusion vulnerability. cPanel has
also made upgrades in cPanel's PHP application security model for Horde,
PHPMyAdmin, and PHPPGAdmin. These upgrades have been made to minimize or mitigate
undiscovered vulnerabilities in these third-party applications while running within
a cPanel installation.

Fix Details:
It is recommended that all cPanel servers running Horde be updated to either
cPanel 11.18.3 or cPanel 11.19.3. If you do not wish to update cPanel, it is
strongly recommended that you keep horde disabled until these updates have been
applied. You can disable horde on your cPanel system by unchecking WHM ->
Server Configuration -> Tweak Settings -> Mail -> Horde Webmail, and saving with
the new settings.

You can check your current version of cPanel by executing:
/usr/local/cpanel/cpanel -V

Updates can be run via the following command executed from a root shell:
/scripts/upcp

Updates can be run through WHM as well. Login to WHM, then select cPanel -> Upgrade
to Latest Version -> Click to Upgrade.

References:
http://lists.horde.org/archives/announce/2008/000382.html

Credits:
cPanel would also like to thank Jeff Petersen and Rob Brown for the additional
security information provided with regards to this update.

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Jan 15, 2008

NOC:

You are receiving this communication because you are listed as the
tech contact for Cyber Wurx, LLC.

A recent update of the Perl module PathTools which provides Cwd and the File::Spec module namespace introduces usage of Perl 5.10 functions.
This change will result in an undefined symbol error similar to:

symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/i686-linux/auto/Cwd/Cwd.so: undefined symbol: strlcpy

More Information about this problem is available in CPAN's bug tracking system: http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=32296

On cPanel systems this issue will be immediately evident in the cPanel user interface for MySQL, resulting in a failure to display any end
user databases as well as preventing any modifications to MySQL configurations.

This issue has been addressed in the cPanel code base and systems running cPanel 11 will be automatically repaired. This issue can be manually
repaired on cPanel 10 systems by running the following commands:

rm -f /home/.cpcpan/modules.versions
/scripts/perlinstaller --force Cwd

cPanel recommends updating any systems running versions of cPanel less than 11 to the latest available version.

PathTools 3.2501 is latest working version of the module. This version can be found on CPAN at the following URL:

http://search.cpan.org/~kwilliams/PathTools-3.2501/

The direct download URL for PathTools 3.2501 provided by cPanel is:

http://httpupdate.cpanel.net/CPAN/authors/id/K/KW/KWILLIAMS/PathTools-3.2501.tar.gz



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Sept 4, 2007

From   	 billing@cpanel.net
Subject 	cPanel Advisory: IO::Compress and DNS Zones missing
Body 	NOC:

You are receiving this communication because you are listed as the
tech contact for Cyber Wurx, LLC.

Dear cPanel Partner,

The CPAN module IO::Compress::Zlib version 2.006 has caused several issues for
some. The problems arise due to a dependency upon IO::Compress::Base not
being correctly installed. This is due to some mirrors not being updated with
the proper dependency information. Since the dependencies are incorrect, the
module no longer functions properly. The most noticeable problem from this is
the complete breakage of DNSAdmin, however other issues are caused. To
alleviate the problems, cPanel is providing a hotfix which can be applied in
the following manner:

From the command line:

1. SSH into your server as root.
2. At the command line, execute the following:
/scripts/autorepair io_compress_gzip

Or from WHM:

1. Log into WHM as root
2. Enter the following URL into your browser's address bar:
https://__YOURSERVERHERE__:2087/autofixer
(example: https://www.example.com:2087/autofixer)
3. When prompted, enter: io_compress_gzip

The autofixer will report it is applying "IO::Compress::Zlib autorepair
verison 1.1" This process replaces the IO::Compress::Zlib with
version 2.005. Also a hold back has been enabled to prevent the perl installer
process from installing IO::Compress::Zlib version 2.006 until a new
version is available that fixes this problem.

For non-cPanel servers that experience this issue, it is also possible to
resolve this manually by performing the following steps:

1. SSH into your server as root.
2. Execute the following commands:
wget
http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/P/PM/PMQS/IO-Compress-Base-2.006.tar.gz
tar xfzv IO-Compress-Base-2.006.tar.gz
cd IO-Compress-Base-2.006
perl Makefile.PL
make
make install

The manual fix will also work for a cPanel server.

In order to expedite the process, we have also updated all published builds to include the fix.

If you incur any difficulties during the update process or have any questions
or concerns you wish us to address, please contact our support team by
opening a support ticket though the manage interface.


--
Matthew Carey
Technical Support Manager
techmgr@cpanel.net
+17135290800 x 4041

Aug 24, 2007

From   	 billing@cpanel.net
Subject 	cPanel Advisory: Spamassassin 100% cpu usage.
Body 	NOC:

You are receiving this communication because you are listed as the
tech contact for Cyber Wurx, LLC.

Dear cPanel Partner,

There have been numerous reports recently regarding excessive CPU
utilization by spamd. This is occurring as a result of a bug in the
berkelydb implementation used by SpamAssassin, which causes spamd children
to enter an infinite loop when attempting to open a temporary file in the
user's ~./.spamassassin directory.

You can determine whether or not this is the case by executing a trace
against the spamd process in question, and monitoring the trace for
repeated calls to open() a file in ~/.spamassassin/__db.[DB_NAME].

For example, you can launch a trace on the affected process with the
following command:

strace -vvFf -s 4096 -e trace=file -p [PID]

A trace on an affected server would repeated output something similar to
the following:

open("/home/user/.spamassassin/__db.bayes_toks.new",
O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL|O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = -1 EEXIST (File exists)
open("/home/user/.spamassassin/__db.bayes_toks.new",
O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL|O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = -1 EEXIST (File exists)
open("/home/user/.spamassassin/__db.bayes_toks.new",
O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL|O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = -1 EEXIST (File exists)
open("/home/user/.spamassassin/__db.bayes_toks.new",
O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL|O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = -1 EEXIST (File exists)

We have devised a work around for SpamAssassin, which can be applied by
taking the following steps:

killall -TERM spamd # ensure all hung spamd processes are terminated
killall -9 spamd # ensure all hung spamd processes are terminated

Visit the following WHM URL:
https://__your_sever_ip_here__:2087/scripts2/autofixer
Enter spamd_dbm_fix into the input field, and click 'Submit'

Once the patch has been applied, the spamd loads should subside. If the
problem persists after applying the patch, please let our support team
know, and they will investigate any outstanding issues.

We have notified the SpamAssassin developers of this issue, and expect
that this will be resolved in versions 3.2.4 and greater.





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Aug 17, 2007

From   	 billing@cpanel.net
Subject 	Spamassassin & perl 5.8.8
Body 	NOC:

You are receiving this communication because you are listed as the
tech contact for Cyber Wurx, LLC.

Dear cPanel Partner,


There have been reported issues recently with SpamAssassin in regards to:


1. Load Issues
2. Spamd locking
3. Not catching all spam e-mail


To resolve these issues, please upgrade Perl to version 5.8.8 which is
recommended for using cPanel 11.


You can ensure that each installed module gets carried over to
the updated Perl build with the use of the “autobundle” CPAN feature.


You can create a bundle of the currently installed modules
by executing the following while logged in via SSH as root:


perl -MCPAN -e 'autobundle'


Once completed, you should see the following output before getting
returned to the shell:


'Wrote bundle file /home/.cpan/Bundle/Snapshot_2007_08_16_00.pm'


Once you've made note of this file name, you can proceed with the update.


On linux based systems, you should be able to update Perl using
the installer provided at layer1.cpanel.net:


cd /root
wget http://layer1.cpanel.net/perl588installer.tar.gz
tar -zxf perl588installer.tar.gz
cd perl588installer
./install


On FreeBSD based systems, you will need to install Perl from ports.


This will take a few minutes, so take a coffee break and check
the status when you return. Once the update has completed, you
can install all previously installed modules from the CPAN bundle
by executing the following (with the bundle name adjusted to the
name of the bundle generated earlier):


perl -MCPAN -e 'install Bundle::Snapshot_2007_08_16_00'


This should install each of the modules present in the bundle,
assuming there are no issues during the installation (dependencies,
network, etc).


Once this has completed, execute the following to ensure that all modules
required by cPanel are installed, and restart cPanel:


/usr/local/cpanel/bin/checkperlmodules
/usr/local/cpanel/startup




For more details on the cPanel 11 updates, please refer to the release
notes at the following URL:
http://www.cpanel.net/products/cPanelandWHM/linux/cpanel11/releasenotes.pdf


As always, if you incur any complications during the updates, or have
any questions/concerns you would like us to address, contact our support
team by opening a support ticket, and we will gladly assist you!






Matt Carey
Technical Support Manager
cPanel
mattc@cpanel.net

Oct 25, 2007

From   	 billing@cpanel.net
Subject 	[cPanel] Updating to builds later then 16800 recommend.
Body 	NOC:

You are receiving this communication because you are listed as the
tech contact for Cyber Wurx, LLC.

We are currently tracking a potential denial of service issue with builds older then 16800 (early September). At this time, we recommend customers that are still running these older builds update to any of the currently released versions.

The latest builds are:

11.11.0-STABLE_16999
11.15.0-RELEASE_17665
11.15.0-CURRENT_17700
11.15.0-EDGE_17700

More information will be provided if and when it becomes available. Please note that this may be an unrelated issue, and that this notice only serves as an early warning.

-cPanel Support Team





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