DirectAdmin v1.642 RC

To be fair @Yoshua, the Personal/Personal Plus licenses clearly state that it includes installation technical support/community-based support (https://web.archive.org/web/20220301001200/https://www.directadmin.com/pricing.php)

I see where you're coming from that it's annoying that bugs are not investigated via their ticket system, but if you compare a $2 a month license (literally 50cents a week) to any other open-source control panel platform. At least DirectAdmin monitor and investigate bugs within a timely period (depending on the severity); these free open-source panels don't even have any support or are full of vulnerabilities.

And honestly, if you're running anything mission-critical on these basic plans, you're an idiot. Why would you jeopardise your business over $6 a week..... ($29 with 25% discount)
Speaking without knowing, we have been with DA for 15 years, we have more than 100 internal/bulk lifetime licenses, several of these are also being paid for support and some 30 or more licenses of the new ones, depending on what our clients need for their dedicated or virtual servers...

And in response to your offensive comment I tell you: honestly, for talking about another user without knowing anything about him, with respect, you are an idiot.

Precisely because of ridiculous messages like yours, I have always used this private account, instead of the business one.

Cheers.
 
several of these are also being paid for support and some 30 or more licenses of the new ones

Don't get me wrong, but I'm sure that if you have multiple licenses and you find a bug, you should be able to easily replicate in one of the license you pay support for and submit the report tagging it to that license. The best way to confirm it's not a configuration error is to be able to recreate the issue in another system, so you should be able to easily assess if that's your scenario and submit it.

In my experience, DA support has always gone above and beyond. Sometimes it does take them a couple of back and forth messages to understand my report as my setup is kind of particular, but they have always investigated and solve the issue in the very next release.
 
Precisely because of ridiculous messages like yours, I have always used this private account, instead of the business one.
You should use your business account. That way, your customers who are paying you $$ to run their business can see that you purchased an el-cheapo license rather than a proper one with a SLA/support.

I would be pretty upsetty-spaghetti if I bought a server from you to run my business (that makes real money) and I learned that you cheaped out by buying a license that had no support, that's just as bad as not having backups.

And let's be honest here, DirectAdmin has had a couple of issues, but what development company can produce a piece of software that is 100% bug-free. The last thing DirectAdmin needs is to spend time dealing with customers who bring in no revenue (which they still do help regardless albeit with slower response times) or customers who opt for a cheaper license on the basis that support is not included.

In case you don't know DirectAdmin arent like a cheaper development firm with staff who are paid $2-3 an hour and can fix issues relating to incorrect configurations. Good luck asking HestiaCP for help with an incorrect configuration.

we have been with DA for 15 years, we have more than 100 internal/bulk lifetime licenses
Great. I'm sure you understand that running a business on a lifetime pretence is not sustainable with limited resources. At least you're getting updates and new features. Also, do you think you're the only provider here with internal licenses too?

Surely, you've noticed that huge improvement to DirectAdmin over the past 1-2 years compared to the past 15 years.

paid for support and some 30 or more licenses of the new ones
Are any of these licenses having issues? If they are, you should raise a ticket rather than complain on a forum under a private account.

Edit: If you're an existing DreamIT Host customer or looking for high-quality web hosting, you can trust us to have a proper SLA/license with our vendors. (I can't believe this even needs to be said for a production environment)

Final Edit: Do you know what's worse than buying a license that you know includes community support for a discounted price?

One that increases its price literally 1718% per SERVER (imagine paying $16 per month to $300+ per month over 50 servers) while also making it impossible to review your ticket history without editing the URL. And do you know what's the kicker? We still have countless issues that are far more significant. Issues such as addon domains having their hosts deleted or hostname SSLs failing to renew.
 
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Just to clarify, we do investigate all bug reports. The decision if we need to fix it or when to fix it is never based on where we received the report - ticketing system or forums, who reported it - lifetime or retail client. Decision is always made based on impact or side effects of the issue.

However there are cases when bug report investigation leads to no bug at all, just an invalid configuration on the client server. Then we are happy to help any client that has a support subscription. And not so happy if it is a lifetime license client.

The line between a proper bug and miss-configuration is really blurry and it is hard to know without actually investigating, especially from the reporters perspective. But after investigation is done it is quite clear. If follows one of the patterns: fix is under way, or please change this and that in your server configuration.

One could always blame software for not being easy enough to use or not having good enough documentation. We strive to make it as easy to use as possible, but due to the amount of features and customizations DA accumulated over the years it is challenging.

Thank you everyone for reporting issues ?‍♂️.
 
Just to clarify, we do investigate all bug reports. The decision if we need to fix it or when to fix it is never based on where we received the report - ticketing system or forums, who reported it - lifetime or retail client. Decision is always made based on impact or side effects of the issue.
All reports but mine or can I ignore the part where your said "You have been flagged as repeatedly abusing DA staff ...and it lead to your requests being ignored"?

However there are cases when bug report investigation leads to no bug at all, just an invalid configuration on the client server. Then we are happy to help any client that has a support subscription. And not so happy if it is a lifetime license client.

The line between a proper bug and miss-configuration is really blurry and it is hard to know without actually investigating, especially from the reporters perspective. But after investigation is done it is quite clear. If follows one of the patterns: fix is under way, or please change this and that in your server configuration.
For me it isn't blurry at all for this specific case since it's a clean Debian server installed last year as per instructions. All configuration has been done via directadmin set and CB build commands, no manual extra configuration has been done. Everything worked as expected, just the use_hostname_for_alias option doesn't work after migrating to FastCGI.

If you want to call that "an invalid configuration on the client server" and not a bug while you offer a product that does exactly that, namely configuration on the client server, it's a bit weird not wanting to fix your product or change your documentation to say FastCGI isn't supported on Debian or that it needs specific extra manual configuration only supplied via the ticketing system to clients having a new type of license with support.
 
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@tristan - we check your reports as well. Your issue was checked and I was assured this is a configuration issue. This is nothing personal. I am sorry my initial reply was focused on this single case. I wanted to shed some light that tech support abuse do happen in general and to clarify why we are ignoring this issue.

Please - lets leave this thread dedicated for issues related to the RC release.
 
but if you compare a $2 a month license
He is a Lifetime License user. These old Licenses where sunset-ed a few years back and have no support. Unless you buy support. Which many Older users don't do.

Bug reporting is historically an issue. Since there is not an official bug portal. DA wants you to have support to even report a bug other than here on the forum.

Sorry I wont post about this here.
 
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@tristan - we check your reports as well. Your issue was checked and I was assured this is a configuration issue. This is nothing personal. I am sorry my initial reply was focused on this single case. I wanted to shed some light that tech support abuse do happen in general and to clarify why we are ignoring this issue.

Please - lets leave this thread dedicated for issues related to the RC release.
Can't wait to see/use the Cpanel import tool in the GUI! Could you inform us when v1.642 becomes available in the stable channel?
 
@dafang @DanielP , we have one outstanding issue blocking us from making this 1.642 release into stable - this is themes support.

All our recent efforts in upgrading Evolution customization pages was driven by the underlying goal of completely deprecating and removing Evolution sub-themes support. We are making everything that was possible by installing custom sub-theme to be available directly as DA customization in the GUI.

Writing sub-themes for Evolution was hard and required software development skills. It also was extremely inconvenient to install or change because it required manually placing files as root in the DA directories. We want to be able to achieve everything via GUI only.

Unfortunately our latest colors upgrade broke sub-themes compatibility. Our plan right now is to include CSS customizations support in Evolution in this release 1.642 (it was initially planed for 1.643). With CSS customizations support (adding custom CSS directly via GUI) we will finally depreciate sub-themes support. After this change instead of installing traditional sub-theme it would be sufficient just to add CSS snippet via the GUI and it would achieve same effect.

We just need to come up with migration plan to detect anyone using traditional sub-theme and automatically convert it to CSS customization.
 
We just need to come up with migration plan to detect anyone using traditional sub-theme and automatically convert it to CSS customization.
if you like, you could try this with one of my DEV server, massively customized EVO with css and sub-themes and real test clients
 
@dafang @DanielP , we have one outstanding issue blocking us from making this 1.642 release into stable - this is themes support.

All our recent efforts in upgrading Evolution customization pages was driven by the underlying goal of completely deprecating and removing Evolution sub-themes support. We are making everything that was possible by installing custom sub-theme to be available directly as DA customization in the GUI.
Does that mean if we have no sub-themes installed, can now safely upgrade to v1.642 and start using the Cpanel import and CSS customizations?
 
You can actually already control what to backup by fine tuning the task parameters. For example:

This list does not include domains data and email data. You can see what options available by triggering custom ad-hoc backups from the GUI and checking what task command gets written into /usr/local/directadmin/data/task.queue.
This can get close, but not exact.

Using - action=backup&database_data_aware=yes&domains=all&email_data_aware=yes&select0=autoresponder&select1=database&select10=subdomain&select11=trash&select12=vacation&select2=database_data&select3=dns&select4=email&select5=emailsettings&select6=forwarder&select7=ftp&select8=ftpsettings&select9=list&start=1658513913&trash_aware=yes&type=sitebackup&value=%user%

That is unselecting Domains Directory: Backs up all user files for all domains and E-mail Data: Includes the messages from the Inbox, IMAP Folders, and webmail data.

Gets close - but the backup package is missing:

backup/%domain%/email/data/
backup/email_data/
backup/email_data/webmail/
backup/%domain%/email/last_login/


directories. This is all I've found missing in limited tests.

The only way to get that information is to select E-mail Data: Includes the messages from the Inbox, IMAP Folders, and webmail data - and then you get the full

imap/%domain%/%emaillocalpart%/Maildir/

for each email account.

Or maybe there is another, better way to accomplish what I'm after.

I'm wanting a backup package of all of the files, configs, other files that is necessary to recreate the account from backup. So that I can create this tar file, restore it on another server, and then the account is setup exactly like it was on the original server. I don't need anything in the account's home directory for this - other than what might be necessary to restore the account (?? Not sure if there is anything in the home directory, I wouldn't think so). The account's home directory is rsynced separately, so that after I restore the tar package, I can just move the rsync'd home directory into place on the server (and change some ownerships) and then the account is just like it was on the original server.

Reason being - if an account is huge - say 50GB - it's a waste of process time taring up the account's full home directory every single night that the backup is run, when only a few kilobytes is changing in the account's home directory. And the home directory is going to be the bulk of disk space that an account consumes.

It makes more sense to use processing time to just create a small .tar file that contains all the necessary information to "recreate" the account on another server. And then keep an rsync'd copy of the account's home directory saved separately, since rsync can just process the changed data in the account's home directory.

The .tar file will probably have to contain the account's database dumps and those would have to be restored by the restoration process when the account is "recreated" and there's a decent chance that some of those database dumps might be significantly large. But right now that's not really a concern. There's no way to really incrementally backup the database dumps anyway (the dumps still have to be created from scratch in order to compare differences - and at that point you might as well just copy a backup of the data dump).

This is a process I've used on the other control panel for years and it's worked quite nicely. We have some accounts that are 300GB in size and it usually takes less than a minute to create the backup .tar file, send that to a backup server, and rsync the minute differences in the account's home directory to a backup server. Backing up the full home directory or even just the mail in every backup run would take hours.
 
hi everyone, we have just released an update to the RC release. Key changes:
  • Fully removed Evolution sub-theme support
  • Added support for Evolution CSS customizations and CSS snippet to achieve same effect as "traditional" sub-theme
  • Support for 64-bit ARM machines
  • cPanel import runner is now able to preserve owner of the imported accounts
Thanks for the thorough explanation of your use case @sparek, we will search for a way to support it.

@dafang - yes, if you switch to the beta release channel you can try checking out the cPanel import feature.

@apogee - would be great if you could check it out and give us some feedback.
 
Been seeing this visual problem on and off for a while, below picture is with 1.642 (build 3072ff67f8701695c310f58beef7ad34b29d63e9). Open Custom Build plugin and click the down arrow, and drop down menu is almost unreadable. Evolution Skin / Standard Layout
Screenshot from 2022-07-25 14-32-48.png

I have seen this happen in a few other spots once in a while, but never made note of them. Made sure to clear browser cache also just in case, still doing it. Tested on Chromium web browser Version 104.0.5112.57 (Official Build) snap (64-bit)
 
Thanks for the catch @cjd. CB plugin was not update in quite a while. Dropped it in our backlog.
 
I've tested it with css (Icons Grid) from the changelog site. The results:

no logos for:
- Maintenance
- cPanel Imports (after editing, I get it)

/reseller/customize-skin/widgets:
still no texts, only "WGT_USER_STATS", "WGT_ADDITIONAL_DOMAINS" and so on....

On mobile size: only the right menu is shown, the left side is no longer visible, also colors are all gone, all white.

On desktop site: the uploaded logo is no longer white, as it was in the old version, also all elements have the same color (searchbox, admin/user switch) and so on.

Language: all languages are shown again, da config: language_list=en, own's are missing (again). On the login site it works perfect.

All users get now the "refreshed" layout and not the one used before.

cPanel Imports: why not with rsync like the DA Migration Tool by buSoft? Send users from the old to the new server would also be nice: https://docs.cpanel.net/whm/transfers/transfer-tool/#live-transfer

Whats about DA-DA Transfers?

/admin/license:
Codebase changed to "DirectAdmin legacy".

Will "DirectAdmin legacy" simply not have ARM support or will new features and/or updates also no longer be available?

What means this?: https://docs.directadmin.com/getting-started/pro-pack/license-changes.html
 
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Yes... I would like to know that too. This means after so such time you will remove the Personal License I read. Not good news.
Pitty, I was just happy DA had introduced a nice license for hobbyists running a forum and a few sites for example. :(

Next to that.... those kind of changes are the changes which DA customers would like to be informed about like per e-mail!

Will the old lifetime licenses still be supported and updated? Got worried again with that message.
 
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@cjd , issue is now fixed, thanks. It will get included in next alpha build and next RC update.

Thanks for your notes @apogee we will follow up on those.

@Richard G, personal licenses got superseded by personal PLUS. Price is still low but you get PRO PACK and more accounts so you no longer have to do everything as admin.
 
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