WHM

There are 2 posts filed in WHM (this is page 1 of 1).

WHM: List Largest Emails In An Account With Subject

I recently needed to find the largest emails in various email accounts and share the size and subject. Not if it was a single email account which I had access too there are likely much simpler options using webmail or an email client to get the same outcome.

It looks like this hasn’t been written about before so I pieced together various tutorials to end up with the final solution.

This guide assumes you know what you’re doing on the command line prompt and that you have the permissions to view the files and folders below. It also assumes you have the permissions to go poking around in people’s email accounts, so be sure to ask for that before you start outputing private email subjects from their accounts

The first step is to check you have the following results for a list of files in the chosen CPanel account’s mail folder:

$ls -a /home/[account]/mail

The above should show you a folder for each domain, but hopefully also a symlink for each account. In my case:

.email@example_com

The above actually points to example.com/email but we’ll be using it in our code.

This code also expects emails to be stored in files ending with ,Sab or ,RSab or ,S or ,RS so check that too.

So here is the full example which I’ll then break down below. You’ll need to update it to suit your needs:

find /home/[account]/mail/.email\@example_com/ -type f ( -iname "*,Sab" -or -iname "*,RSab" -or -iname "*,S" -or -iname "*,RS" ) -size +1M -exec grep "Subject: " {} \; -printf '%s B - ' | sort -nr | head -10

First we use the find command to list files which match our email file name (end with 4 options) and have a file size of greater than 1M:

find /home/[account]/mail/.email\@example_com/ -type f ( -iname "*,Sab" -or -iname "*,RSab" -or -iname "*,S" -or -iname "*,RS" ) -size +1M

We then trigger an exec on that which will eventually return their subject as part of the output, and also print their file size in bytes (%s) followed by a B and a hyphen with -printf

-exec grep "Subject: " {} \; -printf '%s B - '

We then sort the list:

sort -nr

and finally only return the first 10:

head -10

Security of WHM backups to an AWS S3 bucket

When you give your Web Hosting Manager (WHM) the ability to send a copy of your backup to Amazon’s AWS S3 service, you have to hand it a Key and Secret that give it that permission.

The worst option is to hand over a Secret and Key related to your own log in.

The best is to:

  1. Create a policy which
    • Only gives access to a single bucket
    • Only allows the least access required for the task
    • Only allows connections from trusted IP addresses
  2. Create a Group to connect the policy to
  3. Create a user (for the WHM) to connect to the group

For validation of connection to S3 WHM currently requires the ability to write objects, list all objects in a bucket, delete objects. Now for some this is frustratingly more than you want to hand over. In theory WHM could make do with just the ability to write to the bucket, but at the moment we have to make all those abilities available.

Luckily, the fact we’re also limiting by IP and then Secret and Key—which WHM encrypts when you submit them—should make it highly unlikely anybody else will be able to abuse the ability to delete objects.

Here is the example policy that I have in place. Feel free to copy, personalise and use:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "WHMBackupAccess",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:PutObject",
                "s3:GetObject",
                "s3:ListBucket",
                "s3:DeleteObject"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:s3:::YOUR_BUCKET_NAME",
                "arn:aws:s3:::YOUR_BUCKET_NAME/*"
            ],
            "Condition": {
                "IpAddress": {
                    "aws:SourceIp": "YOUR_SERVER_IP/32"
                }
            }
        }    
    ]
}

If you’re in need of help putting this all together, let me know and I might expand this post to include how to do the setup inside WHM and the AWS console.