I don’t use Outlook or download my email anymore because I prefer to leave it on the server where I can access it from any computer or mobile device. Let’s face it, cPanel’s email web interfaces (Horde, SquirrelMail and RoundCube) were nice years ago, but they are lousy on an iPhone and lack the features and power of Gmail.

You manage a number of sites and quickly get overrun with lots of email addresses.  Instead of trying to remember to checkmany email addresses, send all email to a single address that you check.

You want to keep your emails to conduct searches later but do not have enough disk space. Gmail offers a tremendous amount of free storage space where you can archive your emails.

Here is how to set up email forwarding. I assume the email address is already set up.

1. Log into cPanel. Look for the icon and link named  ”Forwarders.”  (Shown at the top of this post.)
2. Click the button “Add Forwarder.”
3. Fill in the address to forward. Then fill in the field where you want the email forwarded to.
4. Click the “Add Forwarder” button and you are done.

This is optional but also helpful:  in Gmail, you can set up powerful filters (“Settings” | “Filters”) to manage these emails do they do not all get dumped into one big inbox.

Forwarding email to another email address is a useful and powerful tool that helps simplify my life.

Get your  job to include useful info in the email that it sends you.  You can notifiy yourself of success or failure, or post details about the nature or results of the cron job.

Let’s say your cron job automatically IMs your boss with a random question every hour (like Wally did in this Dilbert comic strip):

Here’s the code snippet (PHP) that is part of your script run by cron. It lets you know whether your job worked or not, and what you IM-ed:

// check for success or failure

if (empty($buffer)) {

echo “failure”;

else {

echo “success — the IM message was: ” . $im;

}

My example uses  PHP, but the concept is the same if you use PERL, bash shell or whatever you prefer.

When you are working on localhost, the output will display on screen.  You can check and debug there. When you are on your server, the output will be part of the email the server sends you. That way your will have an email history of what you automatically IM-ed your boss and what time it went out.

Take a look at The Top 500 Worst Passwords of All Time:

From the moment people started using passwords, it didn’t take long to realize how many people picked the very same passwords over and over. Even the way people misspell words is consistent. In fact, people are so predictable that most hackers make use of lists of common passwords just like these. To give you some insight into how predictable humans are, the following is a list of the 500 most common passwords. If you see your password on this list, please change it immediately. Keep in mind that every password listed here has been used by at least hundreds if not thousands of other people.

There are some interesting passwords on this list that show how people try to be clever, but even human cleverness is predictable. 

Here is a handy random password generator that I use often.

Awhile ago I moved into a house that had a password protected security system. The previous owners did not provide the password. I was able to guess the password and was able to walk right into an unlocked house. That password was among the top 10. Though friends and family were amazed at my abilities, I had simply used what I knew was a common password. (I never told them my little trick that made getting in easy.)  Don’t let your email, website, or any online login be as wide open as that house was.

Click the AutoLoad link under your preferred webmail client and when you log in in the future, that webmail client will automatically load instead of giving you the option to select webmail client.

1. log into cPanel
2. look for File Manager and follow the link
3. you will get a window that says Please select a directory to open: and a number of options
4. select Web Root (public_html/www)
5. look at the far right column. It says Perms These are the file permissions for each file using the standard Unix file permissions numbering system
6. click the permissions for the file you want to change you can edit it right on the web page
7. click “OK”

In a nutshell, cPanel is giving you an easy interface for doing a chmod.
Unix and Unix-type file permissions appear quite cryptic at first but are easy to understand. More info at Linux File Permission Confusion and other sites you can google.

In case you have never seen one, an “internal server error” page will usually be all text and say something like:

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or
misconfiguration and was unable to complete your
request.Please contact the server administrator,
[email address] and inform them of the time the
error occurred, and anything you might have done
that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available
in the server error log.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered
while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the
request.

What do you do? Check your error logs. cPanel makes it easy to do this.

Log into your cPanel. Scroll down to “Error logs.” This link will show you the most recent entries into the error log for your site. Look for the the date and time of the error you are trying to track down. The logs will provide some info about the error and the file that caused the error.

Remember to use the secure login when you are using a wireless internet connection that is not your own secured network.

cPanel

• Non-Secure http://yoursite.com/cpanel/
• Non-Secure http://yoursite.com:2082/
• Secure https://yoursite.com:2083/

Webmail

• Non-Secure http://yoursite.com/webmail/
• Non-Secure http://yoursite.com:2095/
• Secure https://yoursite.com:2096/

This is because if your script is in, or under, your /public_html/ directory, then it can be executed via a browser by anyone anytime.

Sometimes, it does not restart. This happened to me recently for the first time after years of working with cPanel and Web Host Manager.

If you have shell access, restart cPanel with this command:

/etc/init.d/cpanel restart

cpsrvd failed @ Apr 05 07:08:11 2007. A restart was attempted automagicly.

Yikes! What the heck this this mean? For a long time, I was so spooked by the words “failed” and “restart” that I assumed “automagicaly” was a typo for automatically and missed the small joke.

cpsrvd is “cPanel Service Daemon,” which is gives you cPanel services. It crashes. Often. So often, cPanel handles the crash well by restarting and sending you the above email. So, it’s not a problem. Relax. Whew.