Thursday, April 4, 2013

cPanel 11.36 Upgrade

A cPanel upgrade is in process to version 11.36. Normally we don't announce cPanel upgrades, but this one introduces a lot of new features and makes some significant changes in the way cPanel interacts with the rest of the servers' software behind the scenes. These changes are all for the better, but any time you change the way 20,000 files are handled, there's  always the possibility of a glitch. 

Quite a few significant changes, including the way upgrading cPanel is handled. A new staging step during an upgrade allows a variety of checks to occur prior to changing the cPanel installation. This makes upgrades quicker more reliable, and Future cPanel upgrades should be much less problematic than they have been in the past.

This version has been out for a couple of months (we always wait a reasonable amount of time to allow others to shake out the bugs), but each server configuration is different and it's not always possible to predict a significant upgrade.

This version also brings with it the long awaited modern version of Perl 5.14. Because cPanel relies so heavily on Perl, cPanel servers were previously tied to an older version of Perl (5.8.8), for the simple fact that any upgrade to Perl could break cPanel functionality. Now cPanel comes with it's own version of Perl located separately from the main Perl installation. This will clear the way for server SysAdmins to upgrade Perl whenever they darn well want to!

Also upgraded will be: Exim (the mail server); Dovecot (IMAP and POP3 email server); MySQL; phpMyAdmin; All Webmail applications (Horde, Roundcube, SquirrelMail), and Pure-FTPd (FTP server).

We expect this upgrade to take approximately 30 minutes, and will edit this post when it's all clear. The server will be available during 98% of this time, only at the end of the process when cPanel is restarted a user logged into cPanel might notice a blip. The web server (and websites) won't be affected by this upgrade.

EDIT 11:58pm  The upgrade has completed successfully, and it all looks good!