First Login: WHM

Hello,

Today I will be continuing from the first tutorial, which was how to install cPanel/WHM on your server. By starting this guide, I assume you 1) Have cPanel installed and 2) Know your servers IP.

Ok, the first step today is to login to WHM. You can do this by going to http://IPHERE:2086. In my case, I am running a test server on 192.168.1.11, so my URL would be http://192.168.1.11:2086/.

Once there it’ll ask me for a username and a password. For the username, please input ‘root’. This is the master account which has complete control over WHM. The password is your current root password, after inputing these please click the login button.

There are 6 steps to a basic cPanel server setup. The first step is to read and agree to the cPanel License. Once you are done with that, click ‘I Agree/Go to Step 2′.

Step two will ask for some for some basic contact information. At this point, I would enter an e-mail for your Server Contact Email Address, make sure your servers hostname is correct, and make sure you make it a FQDN, eg: server.brandonlong.me and no just brandonlong.me. For your resolvers, you should have some default ones setup but I always use Google DNS on my servers, so I set the Primary and Secondary to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (no, the order does not matter). Everything else on the page will be auto complete, so now all you need to do is press ‘Save & Go to Step 3′.

The next page is to setup your IP addresses. In my case, I have no IPs to add but just follow the onscreen instructions and it’s pretty straightforward. (If you are unsure on what setting to use, just click ‘Skip This Step and Use Default Settings’.

The next step, Step 4, is to setup your nameserver’s. Most people will be running there own nameservers, and I will recommend BIND. I have never used NSD, so I won’t say it’s crud, but I always have used BIND and it has never once given me a problem.

Once you set this up, you’ll go onto the next part of the page, which will ask you to choose what nameservers to use for the server. I would recommend taking your top level domain from your hostname and adding an NS1. and NS2. to the front of that, it’s one of the easier solutions. Once you scroll down to the next section, you’ll see an unchecked box that says ‘Add “A Entries” for all Nameservers’ and ‘Add “A Entries” for Hostname’, make sure that both of these boxes are checked and make sure that the boxes for ns1/ns2 are filled. At this same time, make sure you setup Glue records, or child name servers records, at your domain registrar so that these will work. Once we have completed this, go ahead and click ‘Save & Go to Step 5′.

The next one will ask for what services to use. I am not going to debate them out here, but for FTP I recommend Pure-FTPd, for mail I recommend Dovecot (It’s running on this server ) and I would leave the cPHulk settings alone.

The last and final First Login step for WHM is to enable quotas. There is no reason for you not to enable them, so make sure that Use file system quotas and let it do it’s thing, otherwise users disk space won’t be tracked. Finally press ‘Finish Setup Wizard’ and you’ll be taken to your WHM mainpage. You’ll learn the basics on this the next post.

-Brandon