Eliminating confusion

disoft

Verified User
Joined
Jun 4, 2003
Messages
28
Location
UK
Hi,

I'm quite new to DA (a week or so - previously cPanel) and, as chance would have it, I also have a new OS (FreeBSD 4.10 - previously RH 9), so I'm suffering from some confusion about how the two integrate.

Of particular confusion to me is what is upgraded by DA and what isn't. Take Exim for example: a search of the posts on here variously states that DA upgrades Exim for us and yet other posts have us downloading files and upgrading it ourselves.

If, for example, I want to upgrade to exim 4.44, what do I do? Specifically, I have the following questions:

(1) Do I run just tell DA to 'Update DirectAdmin' in the GUI and then expect that to get all the latest builds?

(2) Do I download things like the Exim upgrade script (the one provided by DA) to some special directory and then run some special program to upgrade them?

(3) How does DA tally with the ports system. For example, lets assume I installed a package via ports, where could I find out how to make that install DA-compatable?

Okay, in reality I think (1) is incorrect and I think that for (2) I'd download the new files /usr/local/directadmin/scripts/packages, twiddle the appropriate install script in /usr/local/directadmin/scripts to specify the new version and run it. Does that sound about right?

Regarding point (3) is there some documentation on this?
 
Nothing is automaticaly updated by DA this is up 2 you.

Check the version update thread for more info on wich package and how to update.
 
Okay, thanks. I was mislead by this from DA sales:

DirectAdmin keeps itself updated, and also automatically updates software like Exim and ProftpD.

In thread: http://www.directadmin.com/forum/showthread.php?&threadid=6242

I did the update with a pkg_delete and a pkg_add in the end, so that's cleared things up a bit.

I think it would be nice if this updating of 3rd party software was 'officially' documented somewhere as it's very confusing searching threads and sometimes getting what can appear to be conflicting information from them.

As to how DA integrates with the OS, I guess I'll have to figure that out for myself.
 
Welcome to the DA world, disoft! :)

You are not alone in confusion! Many newcomers ask the same things.

(1) When you click "update DA" in the GUI, it simply updates the DirectAdmin application itself, not any other software.

(2) There are a few specific applications that DA helps you keep up to date. Things like PHP, apache, mod_perl, and curl for example. It does this through the "customapache" system. Search for "customapache" in these forums and you will find a wealth of info.

In a nutshell, you log in to your server as root, then cd /usr/local/directadmin/customapache. Poke around the build script and you can see the various building options. To rebuild everything you would generally do:
Code:
./build update
./build all
./build zend

You can find the files that DA updates at http://files.directadmin.com/services/freebsd4.8/

(3) Other than those few items, just use the regular FreeBSD ports system and portupgrade.
 
Last edited:
Okay, thanks.

I did actually manage to do a custom apache okay and I think I'm now beginning to understand what is and isn't updated 'automatically'.

I see it as 3 different procedures:

(1) DA itself - this is updated automatically.

(2) DA-customised apps - these are updated via custom scripts (apache) or the pkg_delete/pkg_add facilities.

(3) Other stuff - this is upgraded via ports as normal.
 
Again through the customapache it does only update "Apache, PHP" specific.

Not Exim etc. the Major applications you still have to do manually and somehow find out if they are compatible or check "version update" thread.

Even though DA does has functionality like updating PHP and Apache it does not always mean these are the latest. Normaly DA does run behind the Security updates.
 
fusionictnl,

You are right, of course. I edited my previous post to remove exim.

It's included on the DA site, but you need to install it manually.
 
Thanks for your help anyway guys.

Bit of a trebble whammy: Linux -> FreeBSD, cPanel -> DA and a new data centre all in one day!
 
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