Managed Servers (KVM VPS)

Control Panel: Migration to DirectAdmin (DA)

Updated

Nameservers (DNS) have all been cutover to run through DirectAdmin clustering. If you’re seeing a zone serial of 2026032001 or greater, then you’re seeing a zone that is being served by DA.

Our focus over the weekend is exposing backups via the GUI, and refining allocations & resources to suit each client’s packages better. This should help to bed down the new platform.

Spam Filtering is then being looked at, now that we have a better understanding of how the routing works with rspamd vs SpamAssassin. We’re excited for the benefits it brings.

Thank you again for your patience throughout.

Updated

Please find below the main documentation for DA, for both your usage and your end clients’.

  1. https://evo.site-helper.com/ for end-user documentation
  2. https://docs.directadmin.com/changelog/ for release info

Currently our focus is on leveraging the need to replace NS2 instances as a way to soft-cutover DNS (cP to DA).

Now we’ve almost finishing the tooling required to resolve some long-standing (SOA/NS), migration-caused (dupe v6) and now-irrelevant (cP/dav) issues and legacy across the zone files.

We’re taking the opportunity to resolve problems, sanitise zones and then process the cutovers. This lets us ensure NS2-DA takes over the role from NS2-cP, compare responses against NS1-cP, finalise NS2 wave, then do the same process again for all NS1 instances. We’re doing this by-client per-nameserver, all NS2 then all NS1.

Updated

Thank you for your continued patience. We’re now onto final action items before closing this out.

  1. DNS has not been cutover as yet. We’re working through testing outcomes & fixes before progressing as we do not want to rush the cutover. There are duplicate IPv6 records to flatten beforehand as an example.
  2. Full Domains (via Domain Setup) should replace Domain Pointers (“Parked Domains”) in your usage, as Pointers are not as functional as Parked Domains were in the old panel. Redirection/forwarding/etc needs full.
  3. Backups are yet to be centrally exposed. These will be available in User and Reseller interfaces inside DA.
  4. rspamd replaces SpamAssassin, and is yet to have inbound mail routing diverted through it at this stage.
  5. Packages & Resource Limits are being gradually deployed to monitor behaviour, adjust and finalise.
  6. AutoSSL is enabled globally however for any straggler domain names, please report them to us.

PHP options, extensions and versions have all been deployed at levels that make sense for agencies. From there you can use “Select PHP Version” (CloudLinux alt-PHP) to adjust options and extensions per-user as well. :-)

White-label branding has been partially applied to client servers where we have your logo (on-dark and on-light) on-file already. Please send your PNG/SVG files & brand colours across so we can improve your UX. Thanks!

Updated

We’ve resolved most quirks and curiosities, and are working through final odds and ends. Thank you.

Please let us know as you stumble upon anything, however our testing pass rates are increasing to near-100%.

Updated

2nd half was larger, and is now fully transitioned with 100% of machines now converted from cP to DA.

We’re now stepping up our testing, adjustment and tuning works - systematically working through it all.
Please continue to let us know of any quirks you’re seeing - we will work through every single report.

Thank you for your continued patience. Clients are already enjoying the positive changes, like:

  • NGINX to OpenLiteSpeed
  • SpamAssassin to rspamd
  • Mailman to Majordomo
  • MariaDB v10.6 to v10.11
  • by-domain public_html
  • ea-PHP to CL’s alt-PHP
  • White-label branding!
Updated

1st half of servers have now been successfully transitioned to DirectAdmin. Testing continues.

2nd half of servers are now exiting from configuration into data migration phase.

We appreciate your continued patience. Thank you!

Updated

Thank you for your patience, we’re very nearly there! Very excited for you to realise the benefits.

  • 1st half servers are migrated to, and will be cutover to before start-of-business in the morning.
  • 2nd half servers are deployed, and will be fine-tuned then migrated to in the afternoon.
Updated

Half the remaining servers are close to finalised now. The second half will be later today/tonight.
From there we have testing rounds to iterate through, exceptions to resolve, tickets with clients, etc.

Thank you so much for your patience. We’re looking forward to the new platform to serve you from.
Client feedback so far has been positive, especially with regard to website performance - worth the change.

Updated

Many thanks once again for your continued patience.

We’ve launched a server-agnostic Webmail here: https://webmail.au

Our email auth patch is now deploying across all client machines. Please let us know if email issues persist.

Machines will be overhauled over the weekend, with testing and updates being sent through as we go. Thanks.

Updated

Final adjustments are being made to our deployment systems for the new platform based on learning from testing & our pilot client on-boarding, and we expect to start transitioning clients this afternoon.

Thank you for your patience. We’re working to ensure the best outcomes for our clients, and are excited to finalise this - especially considering the performance gains that we’ve confirmed thanks to OpenLiteSpeed.

Updated

Machines running on our normal Web Stack will be upgraded to the new platform this week.
This system leverages OpenLiteSpeed and has been shown to improve website performance nicely.

If you need help resolving caching or other issues in the interim, please continue to request support.
We appreciate your patience and are approaching this work in stages (by client) to minimise impact.

If you’re having problems with email, please ticket with logs/screenshots/etc so we can assist/prioritise you.

5 years of planning & 10 years of desire are coming together here. Sadly though, it’s sudden & unexpected.
Thank you for your patience throughout this impact as we work towards the best outcomes for our clients.

Problem Identified

Machines running on LSWS Enterprise are now back to normal operations. Thanks for your patience.

Machines running on our normal Web Stack are close to undergoing changes to resolve the impacts.

For all machine types, we will be in contact with more information overall in due course. Thanks.

Updated

Thank you again for your continued patience. We’ve made headway over the weekend.

  • We are in the final stages of testing a fix to both sides of the problem with a pilot client.
  • Separately we’re finalising a drop-in patch for the email authentication problem only.

Work continues on ensuring we’ve got you back to normal operations ASAP.

Please let us know what else we can be doing for you. Thanks.

Updated

We appreciate your continued patience as we work through these problems. Thank you.

The email issue for a small subset of machines is related to the Dovecot v2.4 upgrade, and cPanel proxying auth via their internal cpauthd/cpsrvd binaries instead of “as usual” via passwd/shadow files and so on. There is a caching fault within cpauthd which leads to spurious “user unknown” errors for perfectly valid mailbox users - exploring the code responsible shows that it was AI-made without proper understanding by cP’s product team.

The access problem we’re now re-focusing on, targeting normal service by/on Monday at this time.

Updated

Many thanks for your patience today. We’re still working on this problem with cPanel+WHM.

There is a new security update that has been pushed out to all release tiers.

Changelog for cPanel+WHM 132.0.25:

- Security Case SEC-67580: Fix cPanel File Download Endpoint IDOR Vulnerability (CVSS Score: 6.5)
- Implemented CPANEL-47921: Added a new tweak setting to control web server log archive retention and a script to perform automated cleanup.

There may also be intermittent email issues, potentially due to the newly forced update to CSF (firewall).

ConfigServer Security & Firewall (CSF) 16.08-1:

"As of August 31, 2025, the developers of CSF (Way to the Web Limited) no longer maintain or support it. They have released CSF under the GPLv3 license.

On supported cPanel & WHM versions, WebPros International, LLC maintains its own version of CSF for security and stability updates only. WebPros do not provide help with CSF configuration or troubleshooting."

Engineers will continue investigating, with most focus on the email component which has just been raised.

Investigating

G’day,

We’re investigating reports of an error when attempting to access cPanel/WHM software.

All hosting services on-server (HTTP, SQL, IMAP, SMTP, etc) are operating as-normal.

Please stand by while we work to understand and resolve this situation ASAP.

If you have any immediate concerns, please contact our helpdesk.

Cheers,
Merlot Digital

The Network Crew Pty Ltd (TNC)

« Merlot Digital website «

Network: AS138521