CPanel To Add IPv6 Support in 2013 | Hacker News Reader

CPanel To Add IPv6 Support in 2013

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19 pointsdanyork14 comments

If you're tired of cPanel and looking for a lighter weight alternative, Virtualmin has served me well for the last couple of years and it's had IPv6 support since 2010.

The website doesn't inspire confidence, but the project appears well maintained, and even the GPL version (which I use) is very capable and has so far been rock solid.

http://www.virtualmin.com/

Virtualmin is also a YC company.

Thanks for mentioning, and using, Virtualmin!

We're not very good designers, I'm afraid. We're aware of our deficiencies in the area of UX and design (in Virtualmin/Webmin/Cloudmin themselves and the websites), and have been working hard on a new design for Virtualmin (with outside help). It's slow going, due to the size and complexity of the codebase, at about half a million lines of code developed over 14 years, but it is happening. But, as you note, it is definitely well-maintained...we do a new release of Virtualmin and Cloudmin roughly monthly, and a new release of Webmin every couple of months.

I'll also mention that we have an active community of several tens of thousands of users, and a full-time person working on providing great support in our forums and ticket tracker and on twitter, so it's usually very easy to get help, whether you're using the Open Source version or the commercial version.

And, while Virtualmin is lighter weight than cPanel, it does quite a bit more, particularly for developers and technical users. Being Open Source, the types of folks who use it tend to be a lot more demanding of some types of functionality and behavior (like being able to edit config files outside of Virtualmin). IPv6 is one example of our users being a lot more demanding and technically advanced than cPanel; I'm shocked they could hold off this long. We were being hounded at conferences and in our forums about the issue years ago.

I just went to poke around your demo, and noticed that some strings appear to be corrupted:

http://imgur.com/9mXDr

that's the status view in the system information page.

Thanks for the heads up. The demo gets fiddled with, and the language changed (which is what happened here; language changed to something your system isn't equipped to deal with; we still have a number of non-Unicode translations which can make systems without that language/typeface look goofy), pretty regularly, so it gets re-imaged a couple times a day. I'll kick off a re-image manually.

Oh, hi there! I would have been more gushing in my recommendation but I didn't want to sound like an advert. No the UI isn't brilliant, but at least it's lean and straightforward. I do wish the support forum wasn't so slow and clunky, but otherwise Virtualmin continues to amaze me. It's great to see features like S3 backup trickling down into the GPL version. I can't afford a Pro license (I'm at university), but were you to put up a donations page for GPL users, I'd certainly give a few £.

cPanel is one of the reasons why I became good at using a terminal to administer servers.

cPanel should have started this much much sooner:

  Much like Y2K, this issue requires a proactive solution rather than a reactive response. That is why cPanel has been working diligently on research and analysis to incorporate IPv6 support into our products.

A proactive solution would have been having this already implemented by the time that IPv6 day happened last year in 2012...

cPanel has been promising some sort of IPv6 support for years now, and so far it still hasn't come. I guess it is good that they are publicly committing to it now rather than just in the support emails sent to them. I do feel that it is too late, and they could have been way more up front about it.

Are there any good hosting control panels at all right now?

Like others have said, cPanel's interface is extremely mediocre, Plesk has turned into a total mess after Parallels acquired it, H-Sphere was equally confusing before the acquisition, DirectAdmin is stuck in the stone age, ZPanel is written in PHP4..

I tried out WebFaction's custom panel and wasn't a huge fan of it, and NearlyFreeSpeech.net is nice, but doesn't offer anything for resellers.

11.36 is going to be quite an upgrade and I hope it doesn't break things

http://docs.cpanel.net/twiki/bin/view/AllDocumentation/Chang...

The new UI in 11.34 is bad enough

CPanel needs to hire a) some decent UX guys and b) some decent English-speaking translators. I've used dozens of CPanel-based shared hosting providers—enough to deduce that their product must be mostly technically sound. Everything seems to get configured properly, there are no major security holes, etc. etc.

But the interface downright sucks. It's slightly more polished (read: glossy) than it was about five years ago, but still an unorganized, cluttered list of unhelpful icons. Plus the text throughout the UI constantly misuses idioms (or sounds like it was written by an eight-year-old).

I know it's de facto standard, but a little cleanup could go a long way.

"Plus the text throughout the UI constantly misuses idioms (or sounds like it was written by an eight-year-old)."

Imagine the frustration developers of other control panels feel when users expect, and occasionally demand, those misused idioms be used by everyone, because "cPanel is the standard".

This has been on request since 2005...

http://forums.cpanel.net/f145/make-cpanel-ipv6-compatible-ca...

Joy - now that's another protocol it can suck over...

cPanel is a positively horrible piece of software.

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