Bypass firewall filters to access your cPanel!

• Posted by Namsahaz Team on July 1st, 2008 filed in DIY

In many corporate networks (such as in your office), the system admin uses firewall to secure the network by allowing access to the Internet only through common ports such as TCP port 80 for the web access (HTTP), TCP port 25 for email (SMTP) and so on. cPanel, the award-winning webhosting manager that we use for all Namsahaz users actually use TCP port 2083 by default. Due to the reason that port 2083 is not a common port, it is usually blocked by firewalls that’s being setup in your office. Therefore, many users will experience “Page not found” or “Proxy error” when trying to access to their cPanel interface from their office because the firewall is denying access to it ; either through http://yourdomain.com/cpanel OR https://yourdomain.com:2083.

In order to solve this issue, we install cPanel proxy in every accounts that we create in our server. The cPanel proxy files are placed inside your /public_html/cpanel/ directory (please refrain from deleting these files). In other words, all accounts in our webhosting package have this cPanel proxy so that you can bypass firewall filters to access the cPanel. However, it is not enabled by default.

How to enable Cpanel Proxy in your account?

If you want to enable the cPanel proxy, you need to create a subdomain by the name “cpanel” as the prefix, such as “cpanel.yourdomain.com”. Once you have created this subdomain, you can access to your cPanel even though you are behind a corporate firewall by pointing your browser to the subdomain’s URL –> http://cpanel.yourdomain.com.

Easy, right? But then again be reminded that you need to be able to access your cPanel in the first place before you can create the subdomain. So we recommend that you create the subdomain when you’re at a place where the firewall is not blocking access to your cPanel, such as at your home. If you are at your office and urgently need access to your cPanel, you can send us an e-mail at support [at] namsahaz [dot] com and we will quickly help you to create the subdomain for you, thus enabling access to your cPanel through the cPanel proxy.

Similar to the cPanel, you can also access to your Webmail’s interface behind firewall by creating a subdomain like “webmail.yourdomain.com”.

The only drawback to using this feature is that you will not be accessing your cPanel through a secure channel. You will be accessing it through HTTP instead of the usual HTTPS connection. Because of this, please be extra careful when logging into your cPanel as the connection is not encrypted, giving more exposure of your login credentials to proxies or any other man-in-the-middle attacks.

For users who doesn’t have cPanel proxy installed and would like to install themselves, feel free to download the script at the following URL: http://cpanelproxy.net

Cheers ~