cPanel LIVE! | Get Started with mail node featuring Nick Koston, Dustin Scherer

cPanel LIVE! | Get Started with mail node featuring Nick Koston, Dustin Scherer [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] welcome to the april edition of cpanel live i'm your host jason nickerson and today's broadcast is get started with mail node in this broadcast we'll be speaking with cpanel senior ui developer dustin shure and a special q a guest cpanel founder and cto nick costen today we're broadcasting live on cpanel.live facebook twitch and youtube and we'll be taking your questions after the presentation if you're watching this on cpanel.live head over to facebook twitch or youtube after dustin's presentation to participate in our q a session if you're already watching on one of these social networks feel free to start posting your questions in the comments in the chat linked mail nodes are a new feature in cpanel version 94 and version 96 and allow you to offload email management from your primary cpanel server onto a secondary server so let's hand it over to dustin now and find out more about lync nodes and the cpanel mail node take it away dustin welcome folks today i'm going to be demonstrating how to set up and utilize a linked mail node if you're not familiar with linked mail knows let me explain it a bit first if you've been reading spoilers and know the gist of it sit tight and i'll get to the finer points momentarily linked mail nodes is a feature we've been working on for a while that allows server administrators to offload mail-related functionality to a separate server or servers functionality like webmail dubcot exum and spam assassin the system currently supports multiple child nodes per parent and allows you to configure each count to use a specific node for that account's mail related functionality if that didn't make any sense i'll explain as i go through the demo and there will be time for questions at the end now let's get started first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to go create a new account well i want to do new.cpanel.net go ahead and give it a password no you can't know what my password is so i'm going to come down here this seems mail related mail routing settings and you'll see a new option here male child node well it won't let me select the option let me see if i can find out more ah it looks like i need to create a new linkage between the two servers so i'm going to click this it'll take me over to that interface go ahead here and create get to that existing child node server i happen to know that that child node is cpanel email uh it goes ahead and creates a friendly name something you can reference later in other interfaces that you'll need this information name it something that's friendly to you i'll go ahead and put in the password here hit create no lastpass i don't need your help thank you let me go ahead and create a new account that utilizes that linkage so i'm going to go new.cpanel.net this looks familiar we were just doing this password and i'm going to make sure that i leave spam assassin spam box i want all the i want all the fancy bits let me come down here and notice that i can now check this box host cpanel email all right that's what i want to use so i'm going to go ahead and hit create creating account on remote no that's what i wanted no lastpass thank you for trying though now for our purposes i'm going to go ahead and create an email so let me jump over to cpanel here create an email if you haven't seen it yet this is glass our new paper lantern style i'm going to create a new email just call it me at new.cpanel.net generate a password hit create now go ahead and close that tab so with there being two different servers we're putting a lot of effort into ensuring that we're making changes in the right place so i'm going to go into this other tab that i have here which is connected to the child node so you'll notice here host cpanel email that's the child node server so we're relevant you'll notice that on the child node for accounts that are distributed which is the term that we use for them you shouldn't be able to make changes here we want to make that clear to anybody that would try to do so for example let me jump over to modify account you'll notice on modify account you get this nice little message that says user editing locked you must edit this account on the parent note seems pretty obvious sends you back to the parent node because we want those changes to be made there so that they prop it propagate down accordingly beyond this things like logging in there's no reason that a cpanel user would ever want to log in on the child node they're still going to log in on their main node they're going to want to go to whatever url they're using there be it cpanel dot new new.cpanel.net kind of overloaded there see so for example if i were to go and try to log in directly on the child node say new c panel login is invalid because that is not a valid login on the childhood so we did that with a lot of uis in here but not everybody accesses the ui directly some people do things on an api sometimes there's there's integrations or they've written a script to do a certain thing and in that case we wanted to make sure that they did it in the right place as well so i'm going to jump over to the terminal here i log in to my child node and let's say for a new cpanel i'm going to go ahead and try to create i'll see ad pop now let's do api user equals new cpanel email ad well that didn't work i didn't bother filling out the information because i knew it wasn't going to work you'll notice that you get an error message here it's actually parsable now we've been doing this in a few places where you'll get a partial detail we use those internally but the error message itself says do not send api requests to this node send those requests to the account's parent node if i would have run this same command with the uh arguments that i need to run on the parent node it would have gone ahead and created that account so at this point since we're talking so much about email i'm actually going to jump over here and i'm going to create a new email let's send this to me at cpanel now me at new.cpanel dotnet i'm gonna say hey and hope you get this email it's for a demo go ahead and hit send come on air mail and then we'll jump back over here i'm gonna go back to my parent node list accounts i'm just going to go through this the impersonation way so new cpanel net email accounts check email i haven't configured that go ahead and hit open hey look at that i've got an email from me hope you get this email it's for a demo all right so that's an existing that's for creating a new account but what about an existing account because obviously you're going to want to take the accounts you already have and distribute them so you'll notice here i have existing.cpanel.net it's almost like i created it just for this demo so i'm going to go here and like with most things on an account when you want to modify the account you go to modify account you'll notice on modify account we've listed out link server nodes currently this one is set to use only this server well i'm going to change that i want to use host cpanel.net i'm going to go ahead and hit save now this is a background process as you can see from the top some people have a lot of email so we want to wait until that finishes the way we actually handle that process is an email will come through letting you know that it's been successfully distributed ah and there's my notification success the server has successfully offloaded mail for the user existing cpanel let's make sure everything's wired up properly i'm going to go over here i'm going to create a new email i'm going to go me at existing that's evil.net you didn't see me create that email but it was already there so another email i promise it's not spam what if i how many times do i need to say spam before spam assassin actually picks it up all right let's hit send wait for airmail to to finish what it needs to finish let's go list accounts again let's just make sure that that email was received email accounts there's the me dot existing check email open up round cue another email promise it's not spam all right so that successfully came through let me jump back over to list account well there's one more thing i want to show so we've got these accounts distributed both new and both existing are distributed right now i don't really want that anymore what if i want to undo this process i decide i want to undo new.cpanel.net so i'm going to go over to modify account just as you saw earlier and now i can change this to use only the server i'm going to go ahead and hit save now that we've de-distributed both of those accounts going to go into link server notes and i just wanted to show this before i unlink it because i didn't mention it before if you go to manage it shows you a nice little list here of the linkages so the accounts that utilize this linkage so that that'll help you with information when you actually try to go to unlink the the node if you ever try to do that and to that point i'm actually going to go ahead and hit this are you sure you want to remove this dangerous operation we want to be sure go ahead and remove this connection at that point we have gone through the entire process of setting up utilizing and distributing accounts i'm going to go ahead and turn things back over to the host for questions and answers thank you very much all right and thank you dustin for that great presentation that was uh really helpful i've been really excited about this new feature and thought about all the possibilities it brings and you know just being able to see what we've done with the ease of use of the ui interface and then being able to actually do command line things with it you know and actually interact with the api it's uh really refreshing to see this stuff happen well thanks we're really excited about this and we've been working on it a while we've talked to a ton of partners customers users we've been all over the forums and discord if you've seen us there just trying to get feedback on the best way to handle this and doing a lot of user testing to make sure it's as simple to use as we can make it fantastic again at this point i want to introduce our special guest we have nick costume with us he is the founder and cto of cpanel welcome nick and right now um we have some questions coming in from uh the audience and i'd like to start with a quick question but if you do have questions go ahead and enter those into the chat of facebook twitch or youtube you know go ahead and leave a response there and we'll answer as quickly as we can my one question would be um dustin when we're talking about mail note male note is a link node um can you explain real quickly for our audience what a link node is and how it actually works and how we can expand upon that oh sure so the easiest way to think about this is square is a rectangle rectangle's not a square we have linked server nodes which are really just a way of clustering cpanel servers together for various functionalities this is the first iteration of that cluster and this one is specifically mail node so a mail node is a type of linkage um as an example of that we hope to expand other types of nodes something like male node for example uh would be the uh not mainly web node would be an example of where we would take this uh as another one where you can um cluster these together and offload specific types of functionality right and so that's like a a parent and child relationship type of thing happening yes absolutely fantastic so um we have our first question here uh from lpo uh is there a command line option to allow mass enablement of the linked mail nodes uh i can answer that so there isn't a specific command line change for doing all of them at once but because these are all done through the modify account api uh you could very easily batch out running modify account for all of the ones that you want to offload that was a great question and our next question comes from frank does the mx point to the master or the the slave that would be the parent or the child essentially right yes uh so nick if you don't mind i'll take this one too uh the the mx records actually point to the child node uh so the parent does the configuration and everything but when the dns is configured they are configured to point directly to the gel this helps with things like spf records and dkim and all of that so it really becomes necessary for those to point to that in server great and the next question is how does this work with disk quotas sure i'll take that one so we have a kind of quota rebalancer that runs periodically so if you have let's say a one gig quota between the parent and the child it'll split it and then if you use more mail then the quota will move more towards the mail server and if you use less uh less mail then the mail the quota will move towards the uh the parent node and as you add more disk usage on one side of the other it'll keep rebalancing until you run out of this space oh that's that's great michael is asking will this resolve many of the issues we currently have with the mail op mail on cpanel with yahoo etc i think i can take this one if you want so the answer is no but this won't specifically address issues you might be having with microsoft or yahoo or gmail but we do have an existing feature email deliverability that helps whm and cpanel users figure out the best way to configure their their records to make sure that those are properly signing in spf records are configured properly and reverse tns is set up so i would direct people to there for fixing those kinds of things all right and eric is asking them how do backups work do you back up on the parents server or do you have to back up both nodes separately so when the uh the package account function runs it will pull in all of the mail from the child node so you can just do it all in the existing backup system oh okay and to clarify you would do that from the parent not the child okay and we have another question here uh while while you were switching between the node i saw the spf record ip saying the same is that correct or is mail still delivered on the main server and only sending mail is done from the mail note can you tell a bit more about that uh so i'm not sure where you saw the spf record configuration but those are directed to that child node that may have been when i was actually on the child looking at that information which may have caused the confusion in the demo i didn't fully clarify when i was jumping between the two servers but those are configured to point the parent no longer receives or sends any of the mail once this configuration is set up that is all done from the child at that point yeah and in the interim when dns is switching over um there is a proxy set up to make sure the mail doesn't get lost that's great to know and we have some more questions coming up but i just want to let everybody know for more information on mail node you can visit our latest blog post about mail nodes on blog.cpanel where we add in all the useful links in the documentation for mail node and if you're looking to increase your offerings or you need more information about cpanel products and partners please visit store.cpanel.net and now back to your questions is asking um how are account backups handled is the mail stream back to the main parent server first and then package up in the backup file or if so what's the performance of this like uh so the back in here the uh the account package will actually so if you were to initiate a package account on the parent um it will actually reach out and i believe that it tars those files and then pulls them into the backup and they end up getting stored in a separate location within that backup so that the restoration process knows where to put them so it doesn't stream them across i believe it pulls uh an actual packaged version of them uh nick can you confirm on that um some of the newer code is is pulling a stream some of the older stuff is pulling the tarball so i'm not exactly sure what version we've actually shipped yet because we're still you know obviously improving this in the background but uh the initial i think 92 version what didn't perform very well but the newer ones are much better all right yeah that's a great question thank you for your question and daniel wants to know is what happens if the parent servers fall down or fail so if the parent goes offline the mail will keep working but the services provided by the parent obviously will stop working and when it comes back on it should just link back up great yeah okay so we're we're about uh 25 minutes in here we've got about five minutes left so get those questions in real quickly if you can we want to wrap this up and get you all your answers as quickly as possible so the next question is i understand that this feature does not allow you to use the remote mail node to store emails for accounts of multiple cpanel servers correct will this feature be launched in the future so i think the question is are you you're asking for many to one uh linking that's that's not an initial feature in the rollout but it's something we're talking about potentially doing in the future right and it's good to let people know too that you know this feature is available right now in version 96 and 94. it's a lot better experience in 96 i know that uh the team has done a lot of work to bring it into 96 so this is a feature that you can play with right now and you can use right absolutely that's correct and so what about the um cpanel performance on microservices i'm not actually sure what's being asked here yeah could you clarify the question and a new question is does the mail node allow direct connections from clients for imap smtp pop and active sync for example a dns template set to send the mail traffic to that specific server yes the mail connections go directly to the child node and follow up here can you disable spf record updating when delegating to the mail node we operate a centralized spf policy i'd have to talk to our qa directly if we've tested that specifically but the idea is that you can configure the mail node with the same configurations that you would currently configure as standalone server um so in theory you should be able to do that just fine um i would like to get more information on that just to see if our qas have actually run through that particular strategy right and we have a question is mail node jet backup compatible i can i can answer this one so we actually have reached out to jet backup and um because of the way they are changing their backup structure i don't know if it is ready for the initial offering uh but they are aware of it and they are making changes to make it work towards the distributed setups i would say look for that in a future version of jet backup right and for everybody who is watching this now that has some questions once we get done um you can go ahead and send your questions to what questions at cpanel dot watching and we have about one or two minutes here are there we have any further questions uh it looks like uh looks like we have a little down time there on this on the server here so i'm going to repeat that again um if you have any questions for our team when watching the recording or aft your question doesn't get answered here you can go ahead and email us at questions.cpanel.net and one of our final questions here does the parent know proxy imap connections so the only time proxy sorry nick i'll go ahead and take this one um so the idea is that once everything is connected up and sent to the mail node uh no proxying is required there but during that phase where things are being distributed or distributed proxies are put in place to make sure there's there's still connections available right i see some more questions here that um they're talking about and yes this is you get cpanel does have the mail node built right into it so if you're using cpanel now you can access the mail node in version 94 and 96 and i i think we have um time for one more question so sasha wants to know will one-to-many links be possible to offer redux redundancy for end users like i said the first version um that's that's rolling out now we just have a one-to-one relationship uh we're exploring the many-to-one relationship and you know part of that exploration may be uh some level of redundancy but again that's not in the initial rollout right okay well it's got one more here frank wants to know can we do many parents to one child um so just i'll refer you back to the previous statement yeah it's a one-to-one relationship currently all right well i guess we're going to wrap it up now we're at our 30-minute mark here i want to thank dustin and nick for a great talk here today and for this great new feature that we have in cpanel and i want to thank everybody for attending today's broadcast and for more information about mail node you can visit on blog.cpanel.net and don't forget to visit store.cpanel.net for more information on our products and partners our next cpanel live broadcast is going to be on may the 20th and we'll be talking about cpanel and alma linux don't forget to register on cpanel.net and sign up for the newsletter for when registration for our next cpanel begins and thank you for watching and we'll see you next time

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