Cpanel/WHM FAQs

Cpanel/WHM is known in the industry as one of the most powerful feature filled web hosting control panels. Both cPanel & WHM are extremely feature rich as well as include an easy to use web based interface (GUI). WHM allows you to but is not limited to administering individual accounts, reseller accounts & performing basic system and control panel maintenance via a secure interface. cPanel is designed for the end users of your system and allows them to control everything from adding / removing email accounts to administering MySQL databases.

Commonly found Webmail Issues

I have gone through some kind of webmail issues with Cpanel, probably a Cpanel bug. I have written down some of them from my memory and how did I fix it...But I couldn't give you any guarentee that this is the proper way to fix. But for me, all these steps worked out successfully

The first couple in the mailbox open fine. all the rest emails shows timeout errors
Solution: Open /usr/local/cpanel/base/3rdparty/squirrelmail/config/config.php and enable allow_server_sort option will fix the issue.

Warning: session_start(): open(/tmp/sess_56938189dc5c6cdc026c8898f898c912, O_RDWR) failed: Permission denied (13) in /usr/local/cpanel/base/3rdparty/squirrelmail/functions/global.php on line 333

Check that /tmp isn't full if it's a separate partition, also make sure that /tmp is chmod 1777. If the issue persists, try /scripts/upcp -f and /scritps/fixwebmail and checkout the results.

Horde Issues

When trying to access webmail through Horde, you get the following error:

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1) Warning: registry(/usr/local/cpanel/base/horde/lib/../config/registry.php): failed to open stream: Permission denied in /usr/local/cpanel/base/horde/lib/Registry.php on line 106

Warning: registry(): Failed opening '/usr/local/cpanel/base/horde/lib/../config/registry.php' for inclusion (include_path='/usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/lib/php/:.') in /usr/local/cpanel/base/horde/lib/Registry.php on line 106

Notice: Undefined index: fileroot in /usr/local/cpanel/base/horde/lib/Registry.php on line 517

Warning: main(/templates/index/frames_index.inc): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /usr/local/cpanel/base/horde/index.php on line 41

Warning: main(): Failed opening '/templates/index/frames_index.inc' for inclusion (include_path='/usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/lib/php/:.') in /usr/local/cpanel/base/horde/index.php on line 41
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Solution
Run the following command :-
chown -R cpanel.cpanel /usr/local/cpanel/base/horde/

This should solve the issue.

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2)A fatal error has occurred:

DB Error: connect failed

[line 108 of /usr/local/cpanel/base/horde/lib/Prefs/sql.php]
Details have been logged for the administrator.

Solution
This should be a problem with the Horde database.
See if the "horde" database exists. if it exists, move it to a backup if repairing the database does not work.
Then, running the following should solve the issue:
mysqladmin create horde
/scripts/fullhordereset

3)Horde and Squirrel mail are not showing any new emails, however, Neomail shows. Why?

The Horde/Squirrelmail uses /home/user/etc/domain.com/passwd to know the location of the inbox of the user , make sure that it is correctly written.

4) Users will often receive this error when they try to access their address book in Horde:
Fatal error: Undefined class name 'string' in /usr/local/cpanel/base/horde/turba/lib/Turba.php on line 168

This error is caused by the user having a comma in their address book in Horde. In order to fix this you must first login to WHM, after this go into phpMyAdmin, navigate to the Horde database, now click the "Browse" icon next to the turba_objects table.
Look for any entries which have a comma in them, edit this entry and remove it. Now, go back to your customer's Horde Address book, it should work.

Squirrelmail Issues

1)Language option not works in Squirrel mail. It always show English version even after I changed the language

Please do the following steps:

cd /usr/local/cpanel/base/3rdparty/squirrelmail
wget http://keihanna.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/squirrelmail/all_locales-1.4.5-20050904.tar.gz
tar -xvzf all_locales-1.4.5-20050904.tar.gz
This will resolve the issue. If the issue persists, do a cpanel restart and check the same again.

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2)I like to update the version of squirrel mail to latest stable version 1.4.3-RC1. Can I do that?

Yes, please do the following steps:

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cd /usr/local/cpanel/base/3rdparty
mv squirrelmail squirrelmail_cpanels_version
wget http://cvf.net/modded_cpanel-sqmail-1.4.3-RC1.tar
tar -xvf modded_cpanel-sqmail-1.4.3-RC1.tar

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Installation is now complete.To add plugins, download the plugin to /usr/local/cpanel/base/3rdparty/squirrelmail/plugins and configure it according to the docs. To install a plugin for use with Squirrelmail, cd /usr/local/cpanel/base/3rdparty/squirrelmail and run ./configure to add the new plugin to Squirrelmail.To prevent Cpanel updates from ruining your installation:

cd /usr/local/cpanel/base/3rdparty chattr +i squirrelmail

If something gets screwed up and you want to revert back to the old Cpanel version, not likely, simply;

rm -rf squirrelmail
mv squirrelmail_cpanels_version squirrelmail
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3) I would like to tweak cpanel so that when a user visits theirsite.com/webmail, they are redirected to squirrelmail instead of seeing the cpanel page where they have to choose their webmail interface. Is it possible?

cp /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/wredirect.cgi /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/w2redirect.cgi
chown root.wheel /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/w2redirect.cgi
vi /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/w2redirect.cgi and add /3rdparty/squirrelmail/src/login.php to all of the Instances print "Location: lines after the {port}
Open /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf and edit the lines with webmail to look like thisi

ScriptAlias /webmail /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/w2redirect.cgi service httpd restart

Note: when using .../webmail.php in the w2redirect.cgi file it sent me to a squirrelmail page that said 'error. must login first' , so I changed the paths to .../login.php and that did the trick.

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Can I see a demo of Cpanel and WHM?

Yes, click here if you like to see a Cpanel Demo and click here if you like to see a demo of WHM. A pop up window will appear asking for username and password. Enter the username and password as cpdemo and cpdemo respectively.

Please send comments on these web pages to sumith at sumith.net

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