Update notifications for Easyapache

Hi!

I'm not quite sure the difference in having emails sent from the server itself and from cPanel themselves. Why wouldn't users in the real world sign up for updates from a mailing list? When Linux distributions have software updates ready, they email out via their release mailing list, not using the server itself. This allows for one email for those updates, not one email per server.

EasyApache 4 will have automatic updates by default, and when software is released, we'll be notifying via an mailing list like we currently do now. There isn't any plans for adding internal notifications for EasyApache updates as we already do this via our mailing lists and news site.

Yes, there is no difference in where the mails come from, but there is a big difference If a user has to go outside WHM and apply for a another service. There in lies the reason for not applying in real world, (which you fail to acknowledge). Maybe they would even go forward and do this additional work, if there was a clear warning for updating manually prominently displayed on the first page of easyapache, but there is just a link to lots of documentation that frankly no one reads unless he has issues with easyapache.

I maintain lots of different Linux distros, but have subscribed to none of their mailing lists, because I get notifications about new updates from the servers itself when updates hit the repo mirrors. There is also a practical reason, that is when maintaining many servers, one might forget to update all of them, and those emails remind me again next day.

If easyapache 4 will do automatic updates without possible notifications, the issue will be even worse. If an issue after automatic update occurs, admins will have to loose time unnecessary to find out where the issue came from (update), because they would not be notified. Especially when updates will not be at the same time as all the mails to all the subscribers of your mailing list.

Finally, I wonder why does WHM even bother to have an option to mail results of updating itself and distro packages. Just for fun? Maybe WHM developers like to do unnecessary work as you see it? According to you WHM admins should just subscribe to XY mailing lists to get notified...

We could continue this conversation, but it looks like your mind is already set and further explanations from my side will bear no fruit. However I can not stay uninformed about servers which have not applied security updates.

I will now have to manually write a script, to keep me informed when my system has new security and other updates which were not applied. Because of this missing basic feature, your responses and additional work for me, I will surely not talk positively about the WHM in the future.

Also, please change the tag of this feature request to "Will not implement" because there is no such feature in WHM and we are talking about WHM not some other service (mailing list of whathever). Keeping it as is is misleading if not flat out lie.

Hi,

Thanks for taking the time to discuss this! I'm absolutely open to the discussions, but I'm having trouble understanding the value of this coming from WHM on a per-server basis vs directly from cPanel when upstream software is changed.

You're right, there is a big difference if a user has to go outside of WHM to get notifications about security updates. How does this differ from Linux distributions? By default, you aren't notified of pending updates unless you run $(yum update) or the like. You'll still need to do something outside of the system if you want to be notified of pending updates. When CentOS releases security updates, they email to their centos-announce@centos.org address. When packages hit the repositories, you don't really know until running (yum|apt-get) update. In my experiences, these notifications sounds like something you have to setup manually still.

With EasyApache 4 and automatic updates, if a user is subscribed to our release emails, they will be notified of upgrades coming down the line. Since we send updates out for all systems and not individual servers, they would know that there was an update via that email. When WHM updates via upcp, if there are issues with the update those logs are emailed to the administrator. This is for a software update failing, not that a software update is available.

I could see adding some information to the EasyApache UIs advising to subscribe to our mailing lists so they are notified when updates are available, but I'm not sure it'll actually be read. However making this notification on the system itself, means that we'll have to run EasyApache nightly in order to check for updates. I could see this being problematic, since EasyApache actually has to run in order to know if there are updates available. This could conflict with some systems who have actually turned off EasyApache updates to lock to a specific version.

It sounds like something closer to a general 'Updates are available for your server' would be more appropriate, but not specifically EasyApache, but EasyApache being included in that notification. Am I on the right path with this?

Again, thank you for taking the time to discuss!

Hi!

One more note, during initial deployment of cPanel systems, during the 'Getting Started Wizard' in WHM, you can input an email address to sign up for our mailing lists automatically, so going outside of the product is not needed to get updated for new releases and security announcements.

I hope this helps!

Hi,

Yep, this is correct!