Why I HATE “smart” Software: Cpanel vs Consultant
Today I was working on one small consulting task and our client asked for an upgrade from MySQL 5.0 to 5.1. It was pretty easy and task was successfully finished and reported to the customer… But few hours after my report I’ve got an email from customer with something like “WTF? Where is my 5.1?!”. I was shocked when I saw happily running 5.0 on their server w/o anything related to my 5.1 installation…
After some short investigation I’ve found out, that it was cpanel (dumb software for dumb system administrators) – it noticed, that installed mysql version (5.1) is not the same as it thought it should be (5.0), so without any warnings or notices it removed all 5.1 rpms and installed “brand new” 5.0.
Here I’d like to say GREAT THANKS to mysql team for such a great software which did not screwed up user’s data in such situation. But what idiots in cpanel development team decided, that is it appropriate and acceptable to perform such operations?! As an administrator and as a software developer I do not understand them – I just can’t understand such approach….
So, enough complaining – here is a piece of useful information for my readers: If you’re so unlucky to have cpanel installed on your server and you’d like to upgrade your mysql manually, then you can perform following operations:
1 2 3 | # touch /etc/mysqlupdisable # chattr +i /etc/mysqlupdisable # service cpanel restart |
After these small changes your cpanel will forget about mysql upgrades and you’ll be able to do what you want and not what some dumb developers decided you should do.
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6 Responses to this entry
Oh-oh. That’s kind of weird stuff. How can they live with such a servers-in-themselfs?
P.S. I hate those cPanels, too
Note that MySQL 5.1 is not yet officially supported in a cPanel environment. Until our Quality Assurance team can verify that software that cPanel/WHM relies upon will not adversely affect cPanel/WHM functionality on the various distributions/platforms we support – the software will automatically downgrade to the latest supported version of the software. Of course, this is the source of your complaint about “smart” software
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If you don’t intend to come to cPanel, Inc for support about unsupported customizations, feel welcome to perform any customization you desire (e.g. preventing MySQL upgrades from cPanel/WHM). After all, it is your server.
I know there are customers that have performed very interesting customizations to cPanel/WHM including running it on unsupported distributions, adding load balancing functionality and so forth. While we do not provide support for such things or assist in creating such functionality, we’re not going to actively try to stop you from doing those things either – as long as it doesn’t violate the EULA of course. That’s what most people use our community forums for anyway, for assistance from fellow users regarding customizing cPanel/WHM beyond what is supported
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I know experienced SysAdmins prefer having control over our software rather than attempt to operate within the constraints of the software’s GUI and command-line interfaces. If you ever need any assistance with doing something to control the way cPanel operates (e.g. adding something to the account creation routines, integrating administrative functions with a custom web app etc.), you now have my direct email address – feel free to contact me at any time or drop by the community forums.
While I can appreciate the usefulness of cPanel to some users, I myself cannot stand them. When someone calls me in to fix something, I head straight for the command line. Amazing that cPanel would make such a drastic change…
upgrade from MySQL 5.0 to 5.1 isn’t always fun. I rarely use cPanel for that
Gotta love David’s corporate droid boilerplate reply here. Guess he completely missed the part about deleting the customer’s software “without any warnings or notices”. Sounds like malware to me.
Cpanel are for newbie webmasters, 16 YO or less, that really desire to own a website so they can be COOL …
Yeah, it sounds awfull, but it came to myyears from some of them