tips on Secure WHM cPanel Webmail

[nsolent]

I typically require customers to use https for securely accessing mail cpanel whm, etc. this has been simplified w/ the whm tweak option to 'always redirect' to those secure ports thus:

/whm => 2087 (also always /securewhm)
/cpanel => 2083 (also always /securecpanel)
/webmail => 2096 (I hope SSL horde and IE get along better these days)

just noticed a new tweak option... "When visiting /cpanel or /whm or /webmail with ssl redirect to the servers hostname." this1's nice! This makes it simple for you to buy 1 SSL cert and know that all of your clients hitting theirdomain.com/cpanel will get your issued/signed cert (no more browser complaints)

Upon ordering a new VPS I was surprised to find these secure pages were not initially running. I saw stunnel (serves these pages) was not running, and failed on cpanel restart, did a tad of digging & it looks like a slight conflict of stunnel already running in virtuozzo host during the cpanel install. this somehow craps up the process, so here's a fix:

hit your VZPP at https://domain.com:4643
VZPP-> System Services: xinetd checkbox and stop
SSH-> restart cpanel: /etc/rc.d/init.d/cpanel restart
VZPP-> System Services: xinetd checkbox and start

-njoy

[nsolent]

ummm, ok bad solution on the VZPP xinetd stop/start above
while i could successfully restart cpanel during & after that process, big problem cause stunnel couldn't start w/ a fresh boot. .. let's find the culprit

"tail /var/log/messages"
messages:Apr 7 07:28:36 k stunnel[13502]: Error binding pop3s to 0.0.0.0:995
messages:Apr 7 07:28:36 k stunnel[13502]: bind: Address already in use (98)

OHHHHH really? so these logs don't usually lie - lets check though

"netstat -ap"
tcp 0 0 *:pop3s *:* LISTEN root

YUP. ok, since we know it's xinetd i dug around in it's conf: ok, i didn't really dig, the tab key does most of my digging!

vi /etc/xinetd.d/popa3ds
look for the line "disable no" and change it to "disable yes"
/etc/rc.d/init.d/xinetd restart
/etc/rc.d/init.d/cpanel restart

*bingo*