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.

 

Spent all day doing paperwork and reviewing BGP. Not that I’m new to BGP, but I wanted to review some things that I’ve not needed to use before, like route reflectors.

Tomorrow: more paperwork that needs to get finished up before the end of November, and then starting to research MPLS, VPLS, and EoMPLS. Yay.

 

Well, not too much to report. I’d hoped to be a little further along by now, but duty calls and my job takes precedence over fun-time.

I made it through the remainder of the development view tutorials, which walk through the typical screen layout stuff, how to handle buttons, forms, etc… Nothing too complex. Normally I’m not much for tutorials, but in this case it’s nice because now I have ready code examples already at hand that I can use for reference when I start putting together apps.

I’m still trying to think of a good app to start with. I have a few ideas that I think could work, and I’m hoping this week that I’ll have a few hours to spare that I can start using to flesh out one of those ideas.

 

Well, I haven’t exactly gotten very far in the process of App development. A client decided to pull a web application project out of mothballs, so that’s been keeping a lot of my spare time tied up after I spend the usual 50-60 hours a week on my full-time job.

I did manage to work my way through some of the screen layout tutorials. I think I’m going to like the XML screen layouts. It looks like you build the layouts in XML and then reference them from the Java app. I like the idea of separating format from function. Back when I did Perl CGI, it was always a struggle to try and keep the HTML looking halfway coherent even though it was broken up through the Perl code. PHP is a little more reasonable, but not much.

I’m hoping to spend some more time on Apps this weekend. Maybe a few more tutorials and I’ll think of the next killer-app, right? :)

 

I’ve decided to jump into Android app development. I figure I can write apps just as well as everyone else that’s making money off these devices, so why not? So far I’ve got the SDK installed, Eclipse (which I’ve used before), and the ADT Plugin for Eclipse. Now I’m waiting for the SDK Manager to download and install all it’s stuff, which seems to be taking a very long time.

Luckily it sounds like Android Apps are written in Java, with which I have some experience. I’m hoping the learning curve will be mercifully short. Now, time to come up with a million-dollar idea!

 

Grrr. Nothing like working with a completely new technology to really wear a guy out. I’m building a test network for IPv6 using old Cisco equipment that we had on the shelf. A 2811 as my tunnel to Hurricane Electric, then a 3725 as a core router with BGP running between the two. Another 3725 [...]

 

I haven’t posted anything in awhile, so I thought I’d say something about IPv6. We’ve been holding off on any real IPv6 planning because we’ve been waiting for our upstream providers to be able to offer native v6. We have our ARIN allocation, but there hasn’t been much we could do with it until now. [...]

 

I’ve been working on a web application lately involving a single server and multiple clients, where all the printing needs to happen at the server rather than at the clients. Usually I’d be using Linux for the main server, which makes things like this easy because of all the free command-line tools to generate and [...]

 

In my last post I mentioned that I was getting ready to implement Signature Pad. Like pretty much every jQuery plugin I try to use, the documentation and examples are never quite exactly what I need. Usually this leads to frustration and eventually a decision to roll my own solution rather than trying to figure [...]

 

I’ve been working on a little project lately that will require users to be able to sign their name on a touchscreen, and then have the digitized signature stored in a database for later recovery. I’ve not had a chance to try it yet, but it looks like Signature Pad should do the trick. It’s [...]

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