How to Install Softaculous

Softaculous is a tool or script that allows the automatic installation of open source, free, and commercial web applications within a few minutes such as WordPress, Joomla, etc. It has 1,115 PHP classes and 413 scripts. It allows users to easily and conveniently install any web application without having to upload, download or modify any files. It’s available for various web hosting platforms like cPanel, Plesk Panel, DirectAdmin, ISP System, Interworx, and H-Sphere.

If the installer is unable to download, connect, or verify the license, please make sure the following ip addresses are whitelisted in your firewall.

Installation process

Before installing Softaculous, you need to enable ionCube loaders in WHM, login as root, click Tweak Settings, then enable the ioncube checkbox. Then, login to the server as root via SSH and type the following commands:

Softaculous requires a monthly license to be able to install all of the scripts it has available. The free version is limited and only allows you to install a few scripts. You can get a license from Softaculous directly or any of their authorized distributors.

 

How to Find a Server’s Inode Usage

Before answering this question, let’s try and understand an inode. An inode (an index node) is used in Unix and Linux systems to index or reference a certain file. This file is a data structure that contains information about the files present in your hosting account or server. This data structure is added into the inode table. In inode, information like group and user ownerships along with access mode permissions like write, execute, and read as well as file types are stored.

Inode has two properties; attributes and disk block location. The following are the different attributes of Inode:

• File type
• File size
• Group and ownership
• File permission
• Number of clicks
• File deletion duration
• File change, modification, and access change

The number of inodes corresponds with the number of folders and files in your account. For example, each webpage, cache file, email or image file is equivalent to one inode. Monitoring the inode is crucial for ensuring optimum performance of the server. You can view your account’s inode usage on the left side inside cPanel that says ‘File Usage’, or if you ssh into the server you can type: df -i

Activating this Feature

In cPanel, this feature is off by default, but you can enable it through the Tweak Settings link in WHM. In that page you can turn on the option ‘Display File Usage information in the cPanel statistics bar (inode count)’.

What if the Inode Usage has Exceeded?

The number of inodes is allocated to your account and if this usage is exceeded, you won’t be able to add any new files or emails.

Get a Detailed View of Inode Usage

If you’re interested in finding out a more comprehensive account of your inode usage and determine what is causing the maximum usage, SSH into your server and enter the following command:

This will show you a complete usage of the inodes. If you want to view which folders/files are taking up the most inodes, use the following command:

find . -printf "%h\n" | cut -d/ -f-2 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

How to Block Countries in CSF Firewall

You may have a visited a website, only to find that it is not accessible from your geographical location. This is because your country’s IP address has been blocked in the firewall of the server the website is hosted on. This is actually a useful feature to prevent unauthorized users from gaining access to important information.

One such application is CSF or Config Server Firewall; it is a free firewall application created for Linux servers, VPS based on Linux, and various Linux distributions. CSF provides the following functions:

• Filtering of incoming and outgoing packets
• Flood, intrusion, and login detection
• User interface integration for DirectAdmin, cPanel, and Webmin
• Ability to deal with attacks like port scans, brute force attacks, and SYN floods

A frequently asked question by most Linux server users and administrators is whether it is possible to block specific countries in CSF. The answer is yes, and here’s how you can.

How to Do it?

CSF can be managed either through the control panel or through the command line. You can easily block unwanted countries from accessing your server. In order to do this, you have to open the configuration file of CSF by editing /etc/csf/csf.conf and then jump to the line that says
CC_DENY =

You can enter the 2 Letter Country Code for each country that you want to block, separate by commas.

For example, to block Thailand, Hong Kong, and Nigeria, the line should look like this:
CC_DENY = “TH, HK, NG”

Save the file and restart the firewall when you are done.

A list of countries and their 2 letter country code can be found at http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/country_code_list.htm