Managing a server

A server has seven sections, and as of this round they are all in one bar at the top of the page — on every one of that server's screens. Wherever you are, you are one click from the other six.

Written for: Administrator

A server has seven sections, and as of this round they are all in one bar at the top of the page — on every one of that server's screens. Wherever you are, you are one click from the other six.

Servers → click the server.

Overview · Manage · Tools · Drop-ins · PHP policy · Mail delivery · Terminal

Before this, Tools, Drop-ins and the PHP policy were reachable only from the Quick actions block at the bottom of the server dashboard — six blocks of scrolling down, on a screen you were reading something else on. And every sub-screen had nothing but a back arrow: getting from the firewall to the tools meant going up and coming back down.

The seven sections, and what belongs in each

Tab	What for
Overview	What needs attention, the six meters, the charts, the services, the biggest consumers and the tasks in flight.
Manage	The machine itself: SSH port, root keys, starting and stopping services, the platform switches (guest agent, trim), the profile, reboot and shutdown.
Tools	What the server carries beside its roles: git, Composer, WP-CLI, imapsync, a Node or Python series, Redis, Docker.
Drop-ins	Your own service configuration on top of ours, per service.
PHP policy	The bounds this machine puts around customers' PHP settings.
Mail delivery	Where this server's post went. Only on a machine with the mail role.
Terminal	A root shell in the browser.

Statistics is deliberately not in the bar. That screen lives under Insights → Statistics rather than under the server; as a tab it would be a tab you press to lose the bar. It is the second button at the top right instead.

The screens that have no tab of their own — the firewall, the logs, the server advisor, integrations, infected files, addresses — draw the bar anyway, with nothing selected. So you can always leave them sideways instead of having to go up first.

What left the Quick actions block

The block at the bottom of the dashboard repeated four things that were already at the top right: the terminal, Configure server, Manage addresses and Statistics. Those are gone. What remains is exactly what has no other door on that page: the logs, the integrations, infected files, the server advisor, the firewall, and starting a rollout.

Choosing the webserver, and which LiteSpeed

The webserver choice appears in two places and they are now the same one: the add wizard (Servers → Add server) and the Configure server panel at the top right of the server dashboard.

Four choices, under their real names:

nginx + Apache — the default: nginx in front, Apache behind it for .htaccess.
nginx — nginx alone.
Apache — Apache alone.
LiteSpeed — and then a second choice:
OpenLiteSpeed (free) — installs on its own, no licence needed.
LiteSpeed Enterprise — licence required — .htaccess compatible and LSCache for every application, but it wants a serial.

Beside it is the LSCache switch, LiteSpeed's own page cache.

The fourth option used to read "OpenLiteSpeed", and the edition was never sent at all — so every LiteSpeed node came up on the free edition, licence or no licence.

A new server on LiteSpeed Enterprise

In the add wizard the panel asks for the serial as soon as you pick Enterprise. What happens then, in this order:

The join code does not carry the Enterprise edition. It cannot: the installer looks for the licence on disk before it does anything, and the panel cannot reach a machine that has not enrolled yet. So the server comes up on nginx + Apache.
As soon as the join is green, the panel puts the serial on the machine.
Only then does it switch the webserver to LiteSpeed Enterprise.

You watch those two steps on their own card under the progress panel, with a Try again button if something goes wrong.

The serial never enters the panel's database. It exists in that one browser tab, goes straight to the server and lives there in /etc/corecp/secrets; the panel only ever shows its state. On the server itself it is the same pair of commands:

printf '%s' '<serial>' | corectl integration credential set litespeed --credential serial --stdin
corectl webserver set litespeed --edition lsws --lscache on

Close the tab before the join finishes and nothing is lost but the convenience: the server runs on nginx + Apache and you do the same two steps on that server's Integrations and Configure server screens.

Switching edition on an existing server

Only possible when the other edition is no longer there. The two share one server root (/usr/local/lsws) and cannot coexist, and removing an Enterprise install throws away a licence activation — which is not a decision a provider switch gets to make for you. So the server refuses the switch, and the explanation appears inside the panel, not on the page behind it.

Removing is done on the machine:

/usr/local/lsws/admin/misc/uninstall.sh     # Enterprise
apt purge openlitespeed                     # OpenLiteSpeed

On a phone

The bar scrolls horizontally and nothing else does. At 390 pixels wide each of the seven screens fits without the page scrolling sideways, and the tab you are on is scrolled into view when you arrive by link or by ⌘K.