For example, a Microsoft Outlook client running on Windows 7 would report:

Receiving reported error (0x800CCC1A) Your server does not support the connection encryption type you have specified. Try changing the encryption method. Contact your mai server administrator or Internet service provider (ISP) for additional assistance.”

Despite the minor version number increment, Dovecot 2.4 is a major update which has significant breaking changes to the structure of the configuration files and thus the old configuration files need to be carefully converted in order to work with Dovecot 2.4.

Dovecot 2.4 should really have been called Dovecot 3.0. I have no idea why Open-Xchange considered a minor version number bump to be appropriate for this release.

The default TLS ciphers enabled for Dovecot (both 2.3 and 2.4) on cPanel are:

• ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256
• ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256
• ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384
• ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384
• ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305
• ECDHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305
• DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256
• DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384

This is almost identical to the very useful Mozilla “Intermediate” list, except that the DHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305 cipher is missing.

Windows 7 has very poor support for modern cryptography since it went end-of-life in January 2020 and so hasn’t received any updates for 6 years now.

The supported cipher suites advertised in the SSL/TLS handshake by a Windows 7 client device are:

Most of these are now considered insecure and thus are not enabled on the server side.

The overlap between the TLS ciphers supported by the client and the TLS ciphers which are allowed on the server side is just four ciphers:

• ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256
• ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384
• DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384
• DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256

Unfortunately, the two ECDHE-ECDSA-* ones will only work if you are using ECDSA SSL certificates. If you are using RSA certificates then you can only use the DHE-RSA-* ones.
Still, we have TLS ciphers which are supported by both the client and the server so this should be working… why isn’t it?

Previously under Dovecot 2.3, cPanel had the following configuration in /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf for the Diffie-Hellman parameters file necessary for the DHE-RSA-* ciphers to function:

# SSL DH parameters
# Generate new params with `openssl dhparam -out /etc/dovecot/dh.pem 4096`
# Or migrate from old ssl-parameters.dat file with the command dovecot
# gives on startup when ssl_dh is unset.
ssl_dh = </etc/dovecot/dh.pem

In Dovecot 2.4 this configuration directive changed to “ssl_server_dh_file” (see https://doc.dovecot.org/2.4.2/installation/upgrade/2.3-to-2.4.html#converted-settings) and it isn’t present anywhere in /etc/dovecot/ post-upgrade on cPanel servers.

As a random, aside; the old configuration “ssl_dh” option value was for the contents of the certificate, which could be read from a file with the redirect. The new “ssl_server_dh_file” option takes file path as the value, which Dovecot then reads itself. As such, when moving from 2.3 to 2.4 it’s important to ensure that you don’t copy over the less than symbol that precedes the path, otherwise Dovecot will try to read the contents of that file and treat those as the path that it should use.

In order to add the configuration for the Diffie-Hellman parameters file to the Dovecot 2.4 configuration yourself, you will need to make use of the cPanel configuration file templating system, otherwise any manual changes to the configuration files in /etc/dovecot/ will get overwritten the next time cPanel regenerates them.

First check if the /var/cpanel/templates/dovecot/main.local file already exists (for example if you already have custom Dovecot configuration or if you are using Imunify360). If not, then copy the file /var/cpanel/templates/dovecot/main.default to /var/cpanel/templates/dovecot/main.local and edit it in your favour editor to add the following configuration to the bottom of the file:

# Required for DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 and DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 ciphers needed for Windows 7 clients to work
ssl_server_dh_file = /etc/dovecot/dh.pem

Once you have modified the /var/cpanel/templates/dovecot/main.local file, you can run “/scripts/builddovecotconf” to regenerate the configuration files from your new template, followed by “/scripts/restartsrv_dovecot” to restart the Dovecot service.

IMAP and POP3 clients running on old devices such as Windows 7 should once again be able to connect as the DHE-RSA-* TLS ciphers that they rely on are functioning again.

The post cPanel Dovecot 2.4 upgrade breaking Windows 7 clients first appeared on Spheron1.

Traditionally you needed an old copy of macOS Server in order to get these APNs certificates, but it was also possible to obtain the certificates using third party scripts such as https://github.com/scintill/macos-server-apns-certs which had reverse engineered the Apple APIs for issuing certificates.
Unfortunately, in October 2024 Apple discontinued this API and so it was no longer possible to issue new APNs certificates for com.apple.mail, com.apple.calendar and com.apple.contact.

Whilst it is annoying that we can’t provide push notifications to Apple users anymore thanks to these changes, this actually becomes a service affecting problem when these certificates expire as it causes any cPanel servers still using the old Calendar and Contacts Server (CCS) plugin (which behind the scenes is the old open source Apple/Darwin Calendar and Contacts Server) to break as the “cpanel-ccs” service will stop and refuse to start with a message about the expired APNs certificates:

-- Unit cpanel-ccs.service has begun starting up.
Apr 22 17:57:34 myserverhostname.com ccs_init[24103]: Using /opt/cpanel-ccs/.develop/virtualenv/bin/python as Python
Apr 22 17:57:34 myserverhostname.com ccs_init[24103]: Starting server...
Apr 22 17:57:34 myserverhostname.com ccs_init[24103]: /opt/cpanel-ccs/bin/caldavd  -f /opt/cpanel-ccs/conf/caldavd-dev.plist -P caldav -t Combined
Apr 22 17:57:36 myserverhostname.com ccs_init[24103]: Reading configuration from file: /opt/cpanel-ccs/conf/caldavd-dev.plist
Apr 22 17:57:36 myserverhostname.com ccs_init[24103]: APNS certificate expired /var/cpanel/ssl/caldav_apns/cert.pem
Apr 22 17:57:36 myserverhostname.com systemd[1]: cpanel-ccs.service: control process exited, code=exited status=1
Apr 22 17:57:36 myserverhostname.com systemd[1]: Failed to start Apple Calendar Server.
-- Subject: Unit cpanel-ccs.service has failed

Frustratingly, cPanel doesn’t provide a way to remove an existing APNs certificate, only to install new ones… given that no new APNs certificates can be issued, this leaves us rather stuck!
Sadly this kind of lack of attention to detail for basic management tasks is common throughout cPanel.

Even more frustratingly, cPanel seem to have removed all of their documentation about the APNs feature, so the only evidence that it ever existed are some very old posts on their badly mangled forum.

After a bit of poking around, I managed to find that you can manually remove the /var/cpanel/ssl/*apns/*.pem* certificate files and then update the CCS config in /opt/cpanel-ccs/conf/caldavd-dev.plist to remove any mention of them with the following commands:

rm -f /var/cpanel/ssl/*apns/*.pem*
/opt/cpanel-ccs/bin/rebuildccsconfig
systemctl restart cpanel-ccs.service

After this, the “cpanel-ccs” service will run normally again so CalDAV and CardDAV services are restored for all users.

The one last thing to do is go to Service Configuration -> Service Manager in WHM and disable “APNSPush” under “tailwatchd”.

The post Removing APNs certificates in cPanel first appeared on Spheron1.

The new versioning system
This makes very little real world difference, but I can’t help but feel like they’re following Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox in a race to have the largest possible version number!

X3 being retired
Finally! X3 is an absolutely horrible theme which provides a truly terrible experience for users and I’ll be glad to see the back of it at long last!

Paper Lantern becoming the only choice
Hopefully with Paper Lantern becoming the only cPanel user interface (and dropping the silly “Paper Lantern” name!), it will start to move away from just being a tarted up version of X3 with some nicer icons and towards a more friendly, usable interface which doesn’t just feel the need to dump everything on one page!

cPassword, OpenID Connect and 2FA
I’ve got mixed feelings about this – the new cPassword interface sounds like a great idea, but the OpenID Connect feature sounds like a security nightmare, particularly with the default service being hosted externally on cPanel.com. At least we’re going to have the option of replacing it with our own backend (as well as being able to disable it altogether, hopefully!).
That said, Two factor authentication is a great addition, although I suspect that we are going to see more support tickets as people lose their phones etc. and lock themselves out of their hosting!

IPv6 only
cPanel were massively behind the game when it came to adding full IPv6 support, so it’s good to see them adding the ability to run completely without IPv4 now, particularly given the recent IPv4 exhaustion at ARIN.

Nginx front end
Good to see cPanel finally starting to catch up with Odin Plesk on this one! Hopefully we’ll see support for more complex configurations in future versions.

Directory Syncing
This could be quite useful depending on how it’s implemented. I suspect that it will be some form of asynchronous rsync based system, possibly with FTP and/or inode based hooks. Hopefully it won’t just be a periodic cron job task!

EasyApache 4
Hopefully EasyApache 4 will move towards using the operating system package management (RPM and YUM) for Apache and PHP, instead of insisting on needlessly compiling everything from scratch. This is one of my biggest pet peeves with cPanel at the moment – it adds needlessly complexity to system administration, makes simple tasks like adding an Apache module or PHP extension slow and laborious and even makes installing cPanel pointlessly time consuming. If they have finally caught up with how the rest of the world has been working for the past decade (or more) then it will be great news!

Courier support finally being dropped
Dovecot beats Courier hands down, so it makes sense to stop supporting Courier and move everyone over to Dovecot. There really is little point in spending the extra development effort support two mail servers, so I’m a bit surprised that it has taken this long.
I wonder if we’ll continue to see support for both ProFTPD and Pure-FTPd as well as BIND/named, NSD and MyDNS in future or if they will also move those towards only supporting a single daemon.

The post cPanel 54 first appeared on Spheron1.

/root/tmp/pear/imagick/imagick_class.c: In function ‘zim_imagick_setfont’:
/root/tmp/pear/imagick/imagick_class.c:1442: error: ‘struct _php_core_globals’ has no member named ‘safe_mode’
/root/tmp/pear/imagick/imagick_class.c:1442: error: ‘CHECKUID_CHECK_FILE_AND_DIR’ undeclared (first use in this function)
/root/tmp/pear/imagick/imagick_class.c:1442: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
/root/tmp/pear/imagick/imagick_class.c:1442: error: for each function it appears in.)
/root/tmp/pear/imagick/imagick_class.c:1442: error: ‘CHECKUID_NO_ERRORS’ undeclared (first use in this function)
/root/tmp/pear/imagick/imagick_class.c: In function ‘zim_imagick_setimageprogressmonitor’:
/root/tmp/pear/imagick/imagick_class.c:9534: error: ‘struct _php_core_globals’ has no member named ‘safe_mode’
/root/tmp/pear/imagick/imagick_class.c:9534: error: ‘CHECKUID_CHECK_FILE_AND_DIR’ undeclared (first use in this function)
/root/tmp/pear/imagick/imagick_class.c:9534: error: ‘CHECKUID_NO_ERRORS’ undeclared (first use in this function)
make: *** [imagick_class.lo] Error 1
ERROR: `make’ failed

The solution is to install the beta version of the module instead:

pear config-set preferred_state beta
pecl install imagick

The post ImageMagick and PHP 5.4 first appeared on Spheron1.

/usr/lib/buagent/control-panels/cpanel/remove-cpanel-integration.sh

This script doesn’t always work for one reason or another, so the other way of doing this is to manually call the cPanel plugin uninstaller:

/usr/local/cpanel/bin/unregister_cpanelplugin /var/cpanel/registered_cpanelplugins/righteousbackup

This is particularly helpful if you forgot to uninstall the cPanel integration before upgrading to R1Soft CDP 3.0 or thought that the r1soft-uninstall-buagent utility would do it for you when removing the R1Soft CDP 2.0 agent (unfortunately it doesn’t, but it does helpfully remove the remove-cpanel-integration.sh script).

Unfortunately the cPanel integration in R1Soft CDP 3.0 is severely lacking compared to R1Soft CDP 2.0 and in my opinion is virtually useless in it’s current form.

As the control panel integration system is a pretty new feature in R1Soft CDP 3.0 (it was missing entirely from the initial release), hopefully it will be bolstered in subsequent R1Soft CDP 3.0 releases to restore it to the same level of functionality as was formerly available in R1Soft CDP 2.0.

The post Remove CDP 2.0 cPanel integration first appeared on Spheron1.

The / partition on this server is running out of disk space. WHM operation has been temporarily suspended to prevent something bad from happening. Please ask your system admin to remove any files not in use on that partition.

Annoyingly, WHM doesn’t notice as soon as you free up some disk space, so not only can you not carry out some essential maintenance tasks until WHM next checks the free disk space but any of your customers with access to WHM (such as resellers) might come across this potentially embarrassing message!

cPanel stores a cache of it’s disk space calculation (basically the output of df) in “/root/.cpanel/datastore/_bin_df_-P_-k_-l” so you can either regenerate this file with the /usr/local/cpanel/bin/build_global_cache script, or alternatively just move/delete this file to get WHM back to normal operation.

The post cPanel root partition space warning disabling operation of some features in WHM first appeared on Spheron1.

Native SSL support failed to pass the startup test. stunnel was started instead.
The exact error was: [linktest=/usr/local/cpanel/bin/linktest-ssl: error while loading shared libraries: /usr/local/cpanel/perl/Net/SSLeay/SSLeay.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
] [binary=/usr/local/cpanel/cpsrvd-ssl] [cpsrvd=/usr/local/cpanel/cpsrvd-ssl: error while loading shared libraries: /usr/local/cpanel/perl/Net/SSLeay/SSLeay.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
]

You should attempt run /usr/local/cpanel/bin/nativessl-install or submit a support request at https://tickets.cpanel.net/submit/

Then hopefully the following will restore it to it’s previous working state:

perl -MCPAN -e ‘install ExtUtils::Install’
/usr/local/cpanel/bin/nativessl-install

I have no idea what causes this or why /scripts/checkperlmodules doesn’t flag the ExtUtils::Install Perl module as missing, but it seems to fix the problem even when using perl588installer.tar.gz from layer1.cpanel.net to re-install the cPanel provided version of Perl and associated CPAN modules doesn’t.

The post cPanel Native SSL support failed error first appeared on Spheron1.

root@tma03 [/etc/yum]# yum-updatesd –debug –no-fork
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/sbin/yum-updatesd”, line 35, in ?
import dbus
File “/usr/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/dbus/__init__.py”, line 1, in ?
from _dbus import *
File “/usr/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/dbus/_dbus.py”, line 48, in ?
from proxies import *
File “/usr/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/dbus/proxies.py”, line 2, in ?
import introspect_parser
File “/usr/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/dbus/introspect_parser.py”, line 1, in ?
import libxml2
File “/usr/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/libxml2.py”, line 215
pass
^
TabError: inconsistent use of tabs and spaces in indentation

In the end, I fixed this by forcing a re-install of the dbus-python and libxml2-python RPMs from the official CentOS mirrors. In my case, this was:

rpm –force -hUv http://mirrors.freethought-internet.co.uk/centos/5/os/x86_64/CentOS/dbus-python-0.70-7.el5.x86_64.rpm http://mirrors.freethought-internet.co.uk/centos/5/os/x86_64/CentOS/libxml2-python-2.6.26-2.1.2.8.x86_64.rpm

Adjust using your mirrors, distribution, version, architecture and RPM revision as appropriate.
Also, always remember to check for updates after manually re-installing RPMs from the OS repository.

I have no idea what cPanel/WHM does to break Python like this or if updates to cPanel are going to break yum-updatesd again in the future, but I have fixed this on several cPanel 11.25 boxes now!
I know cPanel likes to mess with system files, but these RPMs aren’t in the exclude list that the cPanel installer adds to /etc/yum.conf and forcing a re-installation of them seems to fix yum-updatesd.

The post cPanel/WHM and yum-updatesd first appeared on Spheron1.