Choosing A Port

First you want to decide on a port. Many use port 26 as the alternate SMTP port and CPanel recommends it, but several ISPs who do port 25 filtering also filter port 26, so it really isn’t a great choice. I personally recommend conforming (at least partially) to the RFC’s, so I decided to go with port 587 based on RFC4409.

Setting Up Exim To Listen On Your Chosen Port

Login to your Web Host Manager ( http://whatever.yourserver.com/whm ) and navigate to Service Configuration -> Service Manager. Scroll to the bottom and you will see an option for “Exim on another port”. Check this box and set it to the chosen port (in my case 587).

Hmm…Firewall?

I’m assuming you are running a firewall of some sort (I hope!), likely APF. To open the port in APF run a…

Assuming the file is located in /etc/apf/ you need to…

Find the line…

and add port 587 to it…

Viola!

There you have it! Pretty painless for the most part and easy enough for anyone who has WHM and SSH access to a CPanel server. Questions? Suggestions for another walkthrough? As always, ask away!

I will also be making tutorials to distribute through their service and will be encouraging users of The Edge and my other sites to utilize their video tutorial creation system in order to grow this library of knowledge. Videos are a great way to syndicate content and promote your site, as well as being a valuable resource for your site’s users. While written tutorials are great in their own respect, video tutorials add a bit extra for someone who is just starting out and needs a visual aid to help them on their way.

The Webmaster’s Edge is meant to help Webmasters of all skill levels. These video tutorials will be a great supplement especially for the novice Webmaster.

Can you explain what is meant by add-on domains, sub domains and parked domains? Does this mean if I pay for another domain name I can use the same hosting account? I’ve been curious about this for a while.

Great question! Here’s a rundown on these different types of domains:

• Your Domain – Just a basic definition for our examples. This is your primary domain that you signed up for hosting and for now we’ll call this: http://webmastersedge.net/
• Add-on Domain – This is an extra domain hosted on your same hosting account. Example: http://webmastersedgetestaccount.com/ which might be hosted in my /public_html/webmastersedgetestaccount/ directory.
• Sub Domain – This is a sub domain of your current domain. Example: http://subdomain.webmastersedge.net/ which might be hosted in my /public_html/subdomain/ directory.
• Parked Domain – This is an extra domain hosted on your same hosting account, but is just a “pointer” and does not have its own content. Example: http://webmastersedgetestpark.com/ which would just redirect users to the content of http://webmastersedge.net/

If you have any other domain questions, please feel free to comment below!

I plan to better define the list of scripts at a later date, with FAQs and guides on using the scripts, especially scripts like EasyApache.

I didn’t make it as far as I had hoped this week, but I still feel that I am on track for a public release of the website next week.

I did some poking around and found a method of fixing it. Weird that searching the CPanel forums yielded no results.

Here’s the error message that was being e-mailed to me:

/etc/cron.hourly/modsecparse.pl:

DBI connect(‘modsec:localhost’,'modsec’,…) failed: Access denied for user ‘modsec’@'localhost’ (using password: YES) at /etc/cron.hourly/modsecparse.pl line 19
Unable to connect to mysql database at /etc/cron.hourly/modsecparse.pl line 19.

Ok, so that’s a bummer. To fix this I popped open an SSH session and used the following commands:

Take a look at the modsec user’s password, then flip over to CPanel’s WHM. Click on phpMyAdmin and then in phpMyAdmin click Privileges > M > and edit the user Modsec. Change the password to whatever the password was in the aforementioned modsecparse.pl. That should do it!!

• Login to WHM (Web Host Manager)
• Click on “Tweak Settings” and scroll down to MySQL®
• Check the Radio Button for 5.0, scroll down, and click Save
• Log in through SSH and perform the following commands:

SuperUser:

Navigate to your Scripts directory:

Upgrade MySQL:

Recompile MySQL Perl Modules:

Recompile Apache (use your previously saved configuration, unless you want to make some other changes):

Now at this point everything SHOULD be back to normal. There are two main issues you may run into however. The first is the one that I ran into. MySQL would fail to start with:

ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock’ (2)

To fix this I had to perform the following:

Rename the my.cnf file as it contains some old information:

Force MySQL to update again:

…and that should do the trick! However, another issue that you may run into is:

Starting MySQLCouldn’t find MySQL manager or server [FAILED]

To correct this run:

Find the line that states:

basedir=/var/lib

Comment it out by adding a pound sign in front of it:

Save the file and restart MySQL:

I’ll be adding this information to the Wiki as soon as it is ready. Enjoy!

In other news, it appears that the website has started to see a “trickle-in” of visitors already. Jeez, not even finished with it yet! Better get my butt in gear and wrap things up so that I can begin promotion. Once the site is live I plan to have several blog postings a day, whereas right now it is a post here and there. I think that next week I will begin posting at least one a day to start getting myself in the habit.

For those who have stumbled across The Webmaster’s Edge, what do you think thus far? There are only a very few of you, so I don’t expect many (if any) comments, but would love to hear what anyone has to say.

I click the link and…broken. I went to Tweak Settings in the WHM and alas, no option for Roundcube to disable. I wonder if CPanel “accidentally” put in a “placeholder” or something. I think I’ll go post an inquiry on CPanel’s forums and see what they come up with.