My intention in posting this is not to denegrate DA or to complain. I wish to encourage improvement of an otherwise exceptional product.
In a related thread "DirectAdmin auto-update to 1.36.0 crashed" I learned that DA support new of the problem with the 1.36.0 update within hours of its release. (I would have posted to that thread, but apparently it has been closed without any way of reopening it, that I know of.)
Since the problem caused DA to crash, issuing an new update would not have solved the problem since the auto-update would not run. So how are such problems announced? DA surely has records of which users have installed that update. Why did they not email a solution to those users? No announcement regarding the failure and its solution reached me. I saw no such announcement on the forum. It seems to me that a failure such as this would warrant prominent display on the first page.
In the final post by DA support to the previous thread, before it was closed to further posts, I was given a link to a thread (http://help.directadmin.com/item.php?id=29) titled "Updating DirectAdmin Manually". However, the first step is to know that you need to update manually. This was not known. Also, the post refers to "Client ID and License ID" numbers but does not indicate how or where to find these items. I expect this would be especially difficult when DA is not running, and require special knowledge of where these things are stored and how to access them outside of normal DA operations.
DA is not an expensive alternative, although it does cost me an extra $120 per year to use it, by choice, since Plesk could not easily do what I needed. I understand the "do it yourself" ethos of linux, apache and related systems, but I have to compare this to buying a new car, but expecting to stop every mile or two and tinker with the engine to keep it running. Even this is acceptable if I am alerted to what has failed and how to fix it.
Perhaps I have the wrong impression, and if so I apologize, but I see two things: 1) DA does not want to publicly announce when it has a problem, and 2) when you mention such things in an open forum, DA support closes the thread thus stopping any discussion of it.
In a related thread "DirectAdmin auto-update to 1.36.0 crashed" I learned that DA support new of the problem with the 1.36.0 update within hours of its release. (I would have posted to that thread, but apparently it has been closed without any way of reopening it, that I know of.)
Since the problem caused DA to crash, issuing an new update would not have solved the problem since the auto-update would not run. So how are such problems announced? DA surely has records of which users have installed that update. Why did they not email a solution to those users? No announcement regarding the failure and its solution reached me. I saw no such announcement on the forum. It seems to me that a failure such as this would warrant prominent display on the first page.
In the final post by DA support to the previous thread, before it was closed to further posts, I was given a link to a thread (http://help.directadmin.com/item.php?id=29) titled "Updating DirectAdmin Manually". However, the first step is to know that you need to update manually. This was not known. Also, the post refers to "Client ID and License ID" numbers but does not indicate how or where to find these items. I expect this would be especially difficult when DA is not running, and require special knowledge of where these things are stored and how to access them outside of normal DA operations.
DA is not an expensive alternative, although it does cost me an extra $120 per year to use it, by choice, since Plesk could not easily do what I needed. I understand the "do it yourself" ethos of linux, apache and related systems, but I have to compare this to buying a new car, but expecting to stop every mile or two and tinker with the engine to keep it running. Even this is acceptable if I am alerted to what has failed and how to fix it.
Perhaps I have the wrong impression, and if so I apologize, but I see two things: 1) DA does not want to publicly announce when it has a problem, and 2) when you mention such things in an open forum, DA support closes the thread thus stopping any discussion of it.
