I thought I’d put together a quick post with links to various cPanel & WHM plugins. I haven’t used all of these, so don’t consider this an endorsement of any kind. For now, check out the cPanel forums apps and plugins area which in you might find better reviews.

Eventually I’ll post a review of these (at least the free ones) as time allows.

Free WHM Plugins

• ConfigServer.com Firewall – manages iptables, handles brute force attacks, and much more. This is one that I’ve used, and definitely recommend.
• ConfigServer.com ModSec Control – modify ModSecurity rules on a global or per-user basis, and view logs.
• NDCHost’s Clean Backups – clean backups for accounts which don’t exist after a certain period, automated, or on a manual basis.
• NDCHost’s Account DNS Check – Checks and reports domains which don’t resolve to the assigned IPs in http.conf.
• ConfigServer.com Explorer – provides a “File Manager-like” interface allowing you access to your filesystem via GUI.
• ConfigServer.com Mail Queues – Stats and management of your server’s mail queue.
• ConfigServer.com Mail Manage – Management of your email accounts, important statistics, and displays of accounts over quota, over a certain size, etc.

Pay WHM Plugins

• ConfigServer.com’s eXploit Scanner – active scanning of your server to prevent exploits.
• NDCHost’s Secondary MX – Turns a cPanel DNSonly install into a backup MX server.

Free cPanel Plugins

• cPanel’s cPAddons – Allows installation of several popular PHP scripts. Installed via WHM >> Install cPAddons.

Pay cPanel Plugins

• Netenberg’s Fantastico – Installs over 50 popular PHP scripts [List]. The vast majority are free, open-source software, though a few require a license.
• Softaculous – over 130 PHP scripts.

There are a few avenues of support outside of cPanel Technical Support, where you can ask other cPanel Administrators for support:

1. Forums – http://forums.cpanel.net

2. IRC – On EFNET, join #cpanel

As we all know, cPanel does not support NAT at this time. I’ve heard that this may change in the future, but for now we need to make do with what we’ve got.

It’s no problem to have Apache listening on a private IP address because the PIX or ASA handles the public to private IP address translation.  But for DNS, when a zone is queried, it can’t provide a private IP address and expect an outside server to be able to resolve it.  That’s where the fixup, static, and alias commands come in handy.

There are a few IOS rules that will help out immensely with cPanel and DNS translation.

Cisco to the rescue! This will enable the firewall to provide address translation to DNS packets:
fixup protocol dns maximum-length 512

A static NAT mapping must exist, associating the public & private IP:
static (inside,outside) cpanelserver.ext cpanelserver.int 255.255.255.255

An alias must be created which allows translation inside the private network:
alias (inside) cpanelserver.int cpanelserver.ext 255.255.255.255