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WHMXtra is a Cpanel addon module that adds useful features for the root user of WHM. It is recommended for new server users and we managed to get a chance to let you know what we thought about it.

WHMXtra Review

I was very excited to get a chance to review this Cpanel addon tool called WHMXtra. The product has been available for about a year now and is definitely moving forward.

WHMXtra

Author: William Wilson
Website: http://www.whmxtra.com
Cost: $30 per server, less for multiple machines.
Requirements: Cpanel, works with any WHM theme.

What is WHMXtra?
“Xtra is an add on module for cpanel servers, designed to add a little kick to WHM, adding many features you could normally only do via command line on a server or not at all.”

It offers some improved features to your existing Cpanel server by adding an extra link the WHM section.

Installation
Installation was a snap on my RHEL server with WHM 10.8x, I just used wget for the shell script and run that and everything was setup without any errors. After it said Complete… Enjoy I opened up my WHM as root and saw a new link the Add-ons section.

WHMXtra

I clicked the link and brought up the add-ons main interface. I did find the menu a bit basic and a few of the links were not functional. EG since my server doesn’t have MRTG installed that link didn’t do anything and was not needed. After clicking one of the other links I received an invalid license page because I never entered it anywhere. After using the Update License link and saving it, the links then worked.

I really liked the Browser option where you can edit files as root. Similar to the Cpanel File Manager, you can edit any file on the system as root right through WHM. This is handy if you look yourself out of APF for example and need to change the SSH port. It also somes with a shell script where you can run shell commands in WHM.

WHMXtra
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I couldn’t get the Shell Commander script to work however. The root password kept being rejected. So I tried to edit the configuration file with the link provided but that caused and error when I tried to save and didn’t seem to work.

WHMXtra
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Shell configuration not working?
WHMXtra

The View Logs feature was great. You can tail the X number of lines of any logs files on your machine, including your own custom log file. You may also search for a log file on the system. This feature worked really well, thumbs up!

WHMXtra

After playing around more with the Custom Links link, I noticed you can customize the Billing and Support links as well as custom links. I thought those were just dead the first time I used them. Now I see the author meant for you to put links to your own billing/support system and have them as kind of a shortcut.

WHMXtra
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The Services and Editors section also allow you to further customize your machines configurations. The Services seems more like a replacement of the WHM ability to restart services such as Named and Crond which is nice to see since WHM doesn’t actually offer a restart ability for these where WHMXtra does!

WHMXtra

The Editors section is basically a pre-set list of configuration files that you can edit such as php.ini, httpd.conf, named.conf and a few others which makes getting to them quick and easy. These all worked well and did what they claimed.

WHMXtra

The Tool Box section is and sub-menu of the main menu. From here there’s a better breakdown of the tools with descriptions of each. This is what I expected the main menu to look like, something a bit more organized. I much preferred using this section of the script because everything was well organized and easy to find. There are additional links in here not found in the main menu such as Custmoize 404 pages, Fix scripts, Package account ability and more.

WHMXtra
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Finally there’s a section called RG Security. It lists all the security tools that are part of WHMXtra. Rookit H,unter, Chkrootkit, APF, BFD, LibSafe and a few others. However it was missing a few of the security related ones found in other sections such as Secure MySQL, Disable/Enable WGET, and Dos Deflate X.

Uninstalling was also as easy as installation which is always something most authors forget about.

root@server [~/xtradocs]# ./uninstall.sh
Removing all files……..
Xtra Uninstall completed.

Final Words on WHMXtra

Overall I’m impressed with WHMXtra. I have to say it has lots of features you will actually use, especially for those who are new to shell or don’t have access to it. It helps add another level of ease to your server management but it still can’t replace the sound knowledge of mastering the shell. With only a few small bugs encountered there are a few suggestions I have for improvement. The menu/organization needs some type of re-vamp. It’s to difficult to get around, where some links are in certain sub-menus and other are not where they should be. This would greatly improve the scripts polished look. For the small fee of $30 per server, this is definitely something new server admins should really consider getting because it will make your daily management easier and help take some of the stress out of figuring out how to use shell, but you still need to know how to optimize and secure your configuration files. Having a experience system admin setup your server is still recommended.

About the Author:
Steven Leggett is the editor of WebHostGear.com – The Hosting Resource for Professionals. Free Cpanel Tutorials, server help and guides for those new and experience to dedicated servers and the web hosting industry. WebHostGear.com is owned and operated by Wave Point Media Inc.

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