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CPANEL-35877 and the death of cPanel
If you hosts using cPanel haven't figured it out just yet, there's a fun issue where customers routinely cannot send mail unless they repeatedly try until it works. The bug was introduced with the fix to the 21 exim vulnerabilities on May 04, 2021.
Today, July 06, 2021, this bug is still live in cPanel servers and users experience it to varying degrees seemingly at random. The bug is simply this:
"condition check lookup defer"
According to cPanel this has been noted to occur when a user hits email quota, and can sometimes be fixed by restarting Dovecot. None of this is true. It cannot be solved without a software patch, not even briefly. Any correlation with a fix is merely correlation with the randomness of the behavior to begin with.
At this time, cPanel is holding back a fix for version 98 with plans to backport it at that time. However, cPanel 98 is not even on their testing tier at this time. It's release date is unknown, possibly far into the future. That's two months so far that many, if not all, cPanel servers are broken. Due to the intermittent and random nature of it, customer complaints may not be plentiful, but the bug is there and has been confirmed on all of our cPanel servers at MXroute at this time.
In a year where cPanel has continually raised prices in an effort to extort their client base ("Would be a shame if you had to migrate...") and shake them down for every penny, they've released a major bug in the usability of their platform which threatens to go unchecked for at least a quarter of a year.
This needs to be spread louder. Anyone considering the purchase of a cPanel license needs to be aware. Take your money elsewhere. I don't know what they're using it for, but it isn't development.
Comments
To follow up on my reaction to this at MXroute:
It has been my determination that the random behavior generates less complaints than migration to a new platform. Working around cPanel to attempt to fix it myself is unacceptable given the pricing increases and the likelihood of being abandoned by their support for breaking their package management. My determination has been that the least evil resolution to this problem is to wait for cPanel to release a patch. I'll do so, but with annoying volume.
Given the volume of complaints from my customers, I suspect many hosts have yet to even receive a complaint. A lot of customers take temporary errors with a grain of salt and stay quiet.
Have Mailing/Mailchanneles enabled on my servers, didn't noticed the issue yet (if it's technically possible it appears in this setup).
My servers relay externally in the same way. Run this:
No result so I suppose nothing of this in my log. I'm sending approximately 4-5 emails per hour maybe I need to send more that the bug has a bigger chance to occure.
Aye probably too little. Servers with a few hundred times that activity are only seeing about 15 errors since last log rotation, while servers sending even more are seeing thousands.
cPanel is quick to break but very slow to fix.
More than once we've seen them forget to include a core library and then take weeks/months to merge (even on EDGE). We had once where they broke DNS zone creation (forgot a .pm) and it took almost a month before they pushed out a fix.
They're increased their revenue by many orders of magnitude, likely chopped their support ticket load by half, but can't do basic development.
It's tiresome.
Francisco
They're more worried about raising prices again.
Not worried, just planning for it.
I've cut my cPanel licenses by 80% and my account count by 50%+, and yet i'm still paying 2.5x more than I was before all of this started.
They have at least 1 - 2 more price hikes before it's too expensive for even the most high priced host. I think they'll need to be $0.30/month to $0.40/month per account on NOC pricing before it becomes too much.
We're already charging $0.50/month per sub account and we got plenty of users that are fine with that. All of our big resellers (people with a ton of accounts) have already moved and now we're just left with people that have a half dozen or less.
Francisco
I have given up on cPanel being someone who tried my hand at plugins for sale. I know I'm not perfect, bugs will occur but building on cPanel was an absolute pain, very restrictive, and I thought at this time expensive as well, low and behold, cPanel decided to become even more expensive. I'm really confused on their vision and outside of cPanel itself, it's such a niche product, it was just too hard to keep working on something that would take 10-15 years to become something important. I said all this to say, cPanel is really just about themselves and I feel as though they've lost touch with how they even became the industry leader panel. They don't even care about the providers who now have the insurmountable challenge of staying lean while offering prices users are willing to pay. The product itself isn't genius either but I probably shouldn't be talking because my products weren't either.
At a certain point it will become cheaper to develop your own software in-house. I surely believe that this is where it will end up eventually if DA decides to greed out.
DA just has to deal with the lifetime licenses. People keep trying to sell their accounts and DA's getting no return on all those licenses/support requests.
Anyway, I don't think they'll go that route. DA's shown that they want to make the product affordable for everyone that wants to use it.
Francisco
Wouldn't doubt that DA pulls a WHMCS and cuts all updates/support.
Well, isn't that the deal, you get cash now, instead of low monthly rates?
Just charge 15$ for each transfer, simple.
For now, DA may remember what they've said.
Give it 10 ~ 20 years. New blood come in, old ones retire, etc. If DA is big enough by then, they will become CPanel 2.0 after being brought out.
The circle always repeats.
Well, isn't that the deal, you get cash now, instead of low monthly rates?
Just charge 15$ for each transfer, simple.
Those licenses have been getting free upgrades, support, etc, for over 10 years at this point without paying in anything new to support DA. Even back then they were sold as a loss leader to grow the product, Mark confirmed that on here.
Anyway, bigger issue is there's a lot of "shared cpanel license" abuse which hurts all the legitimate customers on both cPanel and DA. There's threads every week on here & WHT of people asking about them.
Once that's dealt with, then everyones on the same playing field and you'll see quick shifts in the market.
Francisco
Developing a truly secure control panel is very expensive though. You need good developers to properly isolate the stuff that has to run as root (like anything that modifies config files) from the rest of the system, with secure authenticated IPC or RPC calls between the two, ideally completely separated from each other (ie the public-facing control panel stuff runs in a VM that does not have direct access to any of the config files) and proper isolation between customers. My estimate would be that it'd take at least 2-3 months to fully build, plus a security audit before pushing it to prod, plus ongoing updates (eg if a new release of the DNS server or mail server or whatever changes the config format, or new features have to be added). It might be reasonable if you've got salaried in-house devs with nothing else to do, but if you're getting freelancers then this would likely cost at least $50/hour for a developer that knows what they're doing.
It's be much cheaper to fork a good open-source project like ISP-Config, but I don't know how good their code is nor how difficult it is to build on top of it.
Developer Salary are raising like crazy, and a decent panel cannot develop by interns or jonior programmer.
There have been many huge threads on the forums about building an alternative panel. @Offshore_Solutions even yammered on about a coop and how easy it is, blah blah blah. The exact output of all these threads- nothing, nada, zilch - status quo. If you don't like cpanel, pick another preexisting one and just deal with it and its unique set of issues. Just like you deal with cpanel and its issues. Take solace in knowing you are saving some beer money each month and just get on with the marketing- sales solves problems
That's quite literally how the 'solus alternative' threads went after they got exploited multiple times.
To date the only panels to come out of all of that was @KuJoe's, everyone else died well before anything meaningful came about. When the solus hike comes, and it will, will people just eat it? Bump their pricing? move to proxmox/virtualizor?
Francisco
Just 3 months in, the Cooperative dream is alive & we're preparing to apply for the 2022 Cooperative Grant from Start.coop as soon as it goes live. Like a startup incubator, winning this $10,000 grant in 2022 would launch us in style: https://start.coop/apply/
The end goal is to create a commercial cPanel-like theme for Ispconfig to replace cPanel. Then we follow that up by extending Ispconfig in other ways.
We need 6 more members so we invite you to join & make this dream a reality: https://HostBoards.com/discussion/4240/competitive-edge-join-the-hosting-cooperative
so thats three months to get 2 others to toss 400 in the pot and nothing else done yet?
I thought the price hikes were to fund development LOL
Much progress. Not possible for you to know from the outside. Join us and make this dream a reality. The risk is low & the potential payoff if we win the $10,000 Cooperative prize is high. Some group is walking away with that $10K but we can't win if we don't try.
HAHA! But brilliant of cPanel to blame the investor demanded price hikes on "development", right?
$50 data center get a new ceiling and paint yet?
Yes. $50/year to Co-op members as a server room if they vote to use it. Datacenter isn't the correct description. The 3 buildings themselves cost just over $100,000 & was a bargain being assessed by the town at $684,000.
So, the unusable basement for 50 a year after they pay for upgrades and sign it over to you. Seriously dude, let it go. You are just waiting for someone to do all the work, so you can be the "idea man"
None of your assumptions are correct. $50/year is the total that would be paid by the Cooperative IF they voted to use it. That's $5/year per Co-op member.
Basement is painted and usable if the Co-op votes to use it.
There is nothing that gets signed over to me & nobody would agree to that.
Are you going to release it as open-source? Note that open-source software doesn't have to be free of charge - you can still charge money for it.
I hope some of the revenue will go to the ISP-Config team.
Yes it's likely to be open source. Notice that it won't initially be a separate fork of Ispconfig but only a "theme" that fully uses Ispconfig. What are your thoughts on the "themeing" system that allows you to change the look & feel of Ispconfig? Most of the times that Ispconfig releases an update, our theme will also need to be updated.
I'm perplexed by the German founder & Owner of ISPConfig.com, Till Brehm. I asked him if he wanted to get interviewed at LET by @raindog308 to help advertise his Control Panel. He wanted nothing to do with an interview yet he's tremendously public on his own forum which is smaller than LET.