In a hosted multi-site environment you may find yourself needing to add multiple IP addresses to a server. Luckily, cPanel makes it very easy to add IP addresses. This article will go over adding IP addresses to standalone servers, both through WHM and from command line on a cPanel server.

Click here for instructions on manual upgrades

You can easily change the major version of MySQL running on your server, keeping in mind that the actual version will be dependent on what cPanel has released in their repository. You may notice that in WHM > Tweak Settings, where MySQL upgrades and downgrades are usually done, you can no longer downgrade to versions under 5.0, nor (at the time of this writing) can you choose MySQL 5.1. Luckily cPanel gives you a way to get around this.

Sometimes out of nowhere cPanel will just break. You don’t know why, you don’t know when, and you don’t know how…it just happens. In my experience it’s usually when a cPanel update fails for some reason or perl is borked, but either way – it just sucks. This article will go over how to fix a malfunctioning cPanel installation or botched upgrade.

Chkservd is the service in cPanel that checks to make sure that services are running, then restarts them if necessary.  It’s also responsible for the ‘Service Manager’ section in cPanel, which is also an interface where added services can be easily checked on and off.

Service files are in /etc/chkserv.d/

To add a new service, create a line in ”’/etc/chkserv.d/chkservd.conf’” in the same format as the others:

service:1

1 means the service should be enabled, 0 means it’s off.

In ”’/etc/chkserv.d”’ each service has its own file.  Create a file called as the name of the service you are monitoring.  The contents of the file are in the format of:

#SERVICE = PORT, SEND, RESPONSE, RE-START COMMAND

There are two ways that cPanel checks services with chkservd:

*Connection-based monitoring – By default, cPanel will try to connect to the service’s specified port, issue a command, and if a response is received within 10 seconds it will consider the service to be online. For instance, FTP:

service[ftpd]=21,QUIT,220,/scripts/restartsrv_ftpserver

*Process-based monitoring – cPanel will check for a specific process to determine whether it is online. For instance, named:

service[named]=x,x,x,/scripts/restartsrvr_bind,named,named|bind

If you have more than one restart command, you can separate them with semicolons in order of preference that they should be run.  Output of these commands will be logged to the chkservd.log

After you’ve created the service’s configuration file, restart chkservd:

/etc/init.d/chkservd restart

You should then see the service listed in WebHost Manager in the ‘service manager section’

Chkservd logs are in /var/log/chkservd.log.  Checks are done every 8 minutes, and everyone online service gets a +, offline services get a -.  If the service is determined to be offline, the restart command(s) specified in that service’s chkservd configuration file is issued and the output is logged.