cPanel - cat /dev/home of Dragos Fedorovici

You may find yourself in the situation when you would like any new account created from WHM (WebHost Manager) to be created on a different partition. I will assume that a new cPanel account is currently created on the /home partition and due the low disk space from this partition, you will need to use another one (/home2 in my example) to store any new accounts.

WHM (WebHost Manager) is reading the configuration of a new account (at creation time) from /etc/wwwacct.conf , where it has defined the values for the default IP, the homedir, the hostname, the nameservers etc:

root@server [~]# cat /etc/wwwacct.conf | grep HOMEDIR
HOMEDIR /home

You will simply need to edit this file and change the HOMEDIR path to the new partition (in my example it was /home2):

root@server [~]# cat /etc/wwwacct.conf | grep HOMEDIR
HOMEDIR /home2

Once a new account is created, the home directory will be created on the new partition:

+=======================================+
| New Account Info |
+=======================================+
| Domain: dragostest.com
| Server Ip: 67.210.111.70
| UserName: dragos
| PassWord: root1234
| HomeRoot: /home2/dragos
| NameServer1: ns1.fedorovici.com / 67.210.111.70
| NameServer2: ns2.fedorovici.com / 67.210.111.70
| Contact Email: dragos@fedorovici.com
+=======================================+

If you consider moving an existent account into the new partition, starting with WHM (WebHost Manager) 11.28 a feature allows you to perform this process automatically (you can change the hard drive on which an account will be stored). This feature is only relevant to servers with more than one hard disk. This feature can be useful if one hard drive is beginning to fill or if you have added an additional hard drive with which you intend to split the load.

To change an account’s hard drive:

1. Select the desired account from the list.
* You may use the Account Search feature to search for an account by domain or by user.
2. Click Rearrange.
3. Select the drive from the pull-down menu.
4. Click Move Account.

That’s all for today!

Your default email address is listed under Default Email Account. This is a mailbox that is set up automatically when your cPanel account is created (account’s username and password are the same as your cPanel account username and password), it cannot be deleted or renamed, and has no quota. Your “default email address” is the one, which can be used as a “catch all” (catch all mails addressed to anything@mydomain.com). Using a catch all can be a blessing and sometimes a curse.

If you are wondering on what you should set for the default email address, my suggestion would be to have this value always set as :fail:, and not :blackhole: or your default email address (situation when you will notice a high amount of spam on this mailbox). The reasons behind this option are:

1. :blackhole: first accepts the email and receives it, then is sending it to /dev/null. This is a big waste of your bandwidth.

2. :fail: stops the email from being received, because verify = recipient occurs at the RCPT phase of the SMTP exchange before any data has been received. No bounce is sent and the exchange simply terminates with an SMTP error code. This means much less processing resources on your SMTP server and much less bandwidth (you don’t actually receive the email).

To set the default email address to :fail for every existent cPanel account you could simply run this:

cp -r /etc/valiases /etc/valiases.back
sed “s/^\*:.*/\*: :fail: No such person at this address/g” -i /etc/valiases/*

For new created cPanel accounts you can always force this by default from WHM (WebHost Manager) -> Tweak Settings -> Mail and set Default catch-all/default address behavior for new accounts to fail.

cat /dev/home of Dragos Fedorovici

.. there's a quote by Oscar Wilde and it goes like this: "I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects".

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[cPanel] Change home root and rearrange an account

Set “Default email address” to fail automatically