On Friday another update in the series of updates of the Control Panel, which serves customers of Coolhousing during their work with servers, was carried out. As usual, certain changes were smaller and others were larger, but all of them are intended to improve and simplify work in the Control Panel. Without further delay, here are the most important changes.

Double click, icons and context menu

A major change in the Control Panel is the replacement of single clicking with double clicking in order to open details regarding a record. This change has been in the CP for a longer period, but it is still necessary to point out this function. The path to a record can be faster via the context menu, which you will find by right clicking the mouse. Owners of virtual servers will particularly appreciate the menu item “VPS Administration”, which enables users to get directly to the administration of a specific virtual server. And if when clicking in the context menu or double clicking on the record in the list, you hold down the Ctrl key, the record will open in a new bookmark in the browser.

The Control Panel has also been enhanced by additional icons, such as Back, Save, List, Delete and others. These icons speed up movement between records in the lists, such as contracts, invoices, authorised persons, etc.

Billing groups

Another new function is the ability to combine multiple services into a single invoicing group across the entire offering of services that we provide. It will no longer be a problem for one invoice to come to a dedicated server together with the hosting server or virtual server. This feature greatly simplifies billing of services.

Contact data and authorised persons

Contact data in the client section can now be changed much more comfortably. We divided the data into two groups. The first group consists of data whose changing is not subject to authorisation, such as the language for communication, the correspondence address and settings for sending of newsletters. The second group consists of records that need to be authorised by an employee of Coolhousing, as has been done so far, but compared to the previous condition, the informative reporting of the CP is much better visible, and requests for changes, approval of changes or rejection of changes are now accompanied by informative e-mails.

Several icons have been added to the list of authorised persons, which will help with maintenance of this very important list.

Forgotten password

This probably has been the most desired function since the launch of the Control Panel. Up to now, if you forgot your password to the Control Panel, you were forced to contact customer service, which after authorisation sent you new log-in details. Now you can reset your password yourself, and all you need is access to the e-mail address that you have listed as your primary address in your contact details.

It will continue to be possible to have log-in details for the CP sent after contacting our customer support service, but now you can also have log-in details sent in a copy also to an alternative e-mail address other than the one specified as your primary address.

Changes in VPS control

A major change in control over virtual servers via the CP is the addition of a queue processing instructions. This queue is intended to monitor gradual performance of all orders. Instructions are added to the queue and carried out as soon as it is their turn. If an instruction has not yet begun being carried out, it is possible to remove it from the queue. Therefore, there is nothing stopping you from planning the flow of events on the virtual server and going to make some coffee, because until you return the system will supervise proper execution of all instructions in the correct sequence.

VPS control has also received a few smaller changes, such as:

• Authorisation to boot from a Live CD/DVD, so that it would not be possible to insert an “empty” ISO into the virtual disk drive.
• Added checking of passwords for setting up a VNC console in order to achieve insertion of sophisticated passwords and increase the security if specific VPS.
• Improvement of the manual for setting up rDNS.
• The history of restoration of the virtual server from back-up now functions as it should.

This is a list of the functions most interesting for users, and in the background there are a lot of other smaller changes, which of course are small only due to their extent in the code. Now we can already say that we are planning another update to the CP, which will bring many new functions, not only for the virtual server, but finally for physical servers as well.

However, everything needs to be properly tested first.