Preparing for CPanel 11

As announced in CPanel’s ‘Release Schedule’ by the 2nd of July all the branches including STABLE will be upgradeable to the new version 11. The second stage will be also finished by 10 July on all branches. This means that by that time if you have CPanel set to automatically update this will happen (or it might have already happened for you, depending on the release you are using - EDGE/CURRENT/RELEASE/STABLE):

It is a good idea to prepare your system for the CPanel11 upgrade:

1. Upgrade to Perl 5.8.8

We all know that CPanel depends heavily on perl as most of its internal scripts are written in perl. For this release it is recommended to run perl v5.8.8. CPanel made available an installer that we can use for this upgrade, and we can basically follow up the steps shown in my older post “CPanel Perl upgrade”

To check what is the perl version on your system, run perl -v:

perl -v
This is perl, v5.8.8 built for i686-linux

If you are running v5.8.8 you are all set, but if you have 5.8.7 or an older version proceed with the update:

wget http://layer1.cpanel.net/perl588installer.tar.gz
tar xfvz perl588installer.tar.gz
cd perl588installer
./install

After this is done, ensure that the perl modules are uptodate also:

/usr/local/cpanel/bin/checkperlmodules

Watch for any potential errors and try to fix them before proceeding further…

2. Verify perl modules

There are several perl modules that some peoples have seen problems on upgrading. Hopefully this will be solved soon, but just in case ensure that the following are running ok and are updated: YAML::Syck, File::Copy::Recursive, Compress::Raw::Zlib and Scalar::Util. You can update them manually (if for some reason they didn’t get done by the checkperlmodules script) using /scripts/realperlinstaller:

/scripts/realperlinstaller YAML::Syck
/scripts/realperlinstaller File::Copy::Recursive
/scripts/realperlinstaller Compress::Raw::Zlib
/scripts/realperlinstaller Scalar::Util

You need to do this only if you see errors with some modules caused by the perl upgrade.

3. Convert to maildir

In case you have not done it yet…(why not?) you should migrate your cpanel system to maildir/courier. This can be done by running /scripts/convert2maildir. For more information on this see this post “CPanel MBOX to MAILDIR migration”.

/scripts/convert2maildir

This is highly recommended as v11 is the last CPanel version that will support mbox.

4. Third party modules like Fantastico

If you are using some third party modules like Fantastico, Rvskin, etc. check with their documentation if they are compatible with CPanel 11. If not, either upgrade them to the latest version or disable/uninstall them in order to prevent some possible functions to stop working or even CPanel itself to stop running.

Once you have done these steps you should be ready to proceed to a smooth CPanel upgrade.