Although I’ve been aware of cPanel for years, I’d never had occasion to use it until recently when I was asked to perform some maintenance work on an existing website. Coming from a background of UNIX, shell access and vi for editing, I was not thrilled with what I had to work with.
The first thing I needed to do was check into a problem with part of the PHP code. In my world, I’d shell into the web server, navigate to the htdocs, grep for some target string to find the part of the code I needed, and vi the file to make the changes. Easy as pie.
Well, in cPanel things weren’t nearly as easy for me. I had to use a File Manager tool to navigate around, which was fairly slow. Then when I found a file that might be pertinent to my search, I had to edit it within cPanel’s HTML editor. To be fair, there might be easier ways to do it, but I took the most obvious route.
A week later I needed to block public access to the website while it was redesigned. Again, in my UNIX background, I would shell in, navigate to htdocs, create a .htaccess file, and add a few lines to allow a specific IP and deny all others.
In cPanel, it’s not that simple. The IP Deny Manager tries to be smart about things, but it’s not quite as smart as it could be. For starters, it wouldn’t let me just give it 0.0.0.0/0 to block everything. After a few tries with smaller subnets like 0.0.0.0/16, I determined that it just won’t take 0.0.0.0/X, period. On the other hand, it WILL take 128.0.0.0/X, which is the second half of the IPv4 address space. If you give it a range of IP’s, it tries to calculate out a bunch of subnets to add up to the range. Depending on the range, that can be a lot of entries. Then, to delete them you have to click them one at a time. Normally you would expect to be able to click checkboxes to delete more than one, or select all to delete. Ideally you should be able to pick a default deny or allow rule, and be able to make multiple changes at one time.
Obviously there are many features of cPanel that I didn’t even touch. Also, I realize that there has to be some tool to give web designers access to their sites without giving them shell access. From a sysadmin perspective, however, cPanel isn’t for me.
