Living with EA4

Perception is a funny thing. It can't be quantified with an interminable Power Point presentation full of slides about IO's and Gbps and the obligatory overlays of circles and arrows and subtext explaining what each one was, so I don't expect the l33t techs out there to take any notice of these ramblings of an old man. Elsewhere in this forum, I discussed the surprise and pleasure and ease of the conversion from my CloudLinux/Alt-PHP/CageFS/EA3 system; to use EA4 So now I have had a chance to live with it for a bit, what's the verdict? At this point, I would have to say mixed at best. The first issue was when I decided to replace the default EA4 profile that the CloudLinux conversion process had left me with (Basic Apache 2.4 and PHP 5.5, PHP 5.4, and PHP 5.6), with what looked to be a better build of Apache 2.4, PHP 5.5, PHP 5.6, PHP 7.0, and mod_hostinglimits (This profile uses the Cloudlinux + worker MPM and includes suexec, suphp and mod_security2 to improve the security of your server. ) The PHP 5.4 packages were not fully uninstalled by the upgrade and resulted in the WHM MultiPHP Manager and the WHM MultiPHP INI Editor both throwing errors and complaining about not finding something or other for PHP 5.4. Well we can fix this, I thought, so I went ahead and started to install the full PHP 5.4 package on top of the ones already installed by the new profile, just to come unstuck when the EA4 dialogue suddenly asked me to choose a breakpoint. Now the only breakpoint I wanted at the time involved coffee and doughnuts, and the programmers seem to have been remiss in not adding that option to the list. So off to the docs I went to educate myself about the consequences of choosing one breakpoint over another .... but at that time there was no mention of the word 'breakpoint' in any of the docs I could access .... mission aborted ! Not being one to give up easily, a few days later I tried again, randomly choosing a breakpoint from the list, still being non the wiser about what they did, nor the consequences of using them ..... and after the server took an interminable amount of time to decide what to do (I secretly think it couldn't stop laughing whilst telling all its friends in the rack about how deficient my knowledge was), as if by magic, it informed me I had successfully installed another PHP version. Even better, the annoying errors had gone away in the MultiPHP INI Editor and MultiPHP Manager and they both started to display what I had been anticipating. Now at this point, you will probably ask why I bothered as you will know (of course you read my earlier posts! ... didn't you?) that I don't actually use any of the EA-PHP and rely completely on the CloudLinux Alt-PHP. You would be quite correct, I wasn't sure why I had bothered either and I could find no recommendations for what profile/build/configuration might be the most suitable for what I was trying to achieve, and so I wondered if I could remove all the EA-PHP versions except say 5.6 and have a kinda-sorta EA4 build of what I used to have with EA3. I am happy to report that removing all the unwanted PHP versions (including the recently re-installed PHP 5.4) worked like a charm and just left me with one version, and with everything still apparently working without errors. Now for the intangible bit from that gut feeling (nothing to do with being deprived of coffee nor doughnuts) " EA4 just doesn't fill me with the same confidence as EA3 did. Domains clearly in CageFS that used to trigger usage stats in the LVE Manager are conspicuous by their absence. A new customer today only got their hosting up after provisioning, by us having to manually restart Apache, and the whole thing seems to lack the robustness and maturity that I would expect from cPanel. The WHM profile page is a disgrace, and finding out something simple in the docs like how to create a profile from a current configuration requires going to another docs page and working from the command line, and there is not even a mention or link to it from the 'Create a Profile' page ! So what do I take away from all this ? I shall continue to use EA4 in the hope that it rapidly gets better and starts to live up to being the drop-in replacement for the trusted and proven EA3. I shall continue to mutter and grumble about the deficiencies in the documentation, or until cPanel tell me to go away and that that the software is now only designed for server administrators with multiple degrees in computer science and who work for multinational size hosting companies, and I shall continue to strongly disagree with the accelerated release schedule and burden on testing (or the lack thereof) that it imposes. Now ..... too late for coffee " whisky time :cool: