Suspending an Account: What You Can Expect to Happen Next

Posted by Jamison on 28 11 2016.

Contrary to popular belief, especially to new comers to the world of WHM, suspending an account and limiting the bandwidth are not the same.

When you want to suspend or unsuspend one of your WHM accounts, you can simply use the portal’s “Manage Account Suspension” interface, which you can access by going to the “Home” page, choosing “Account Functions,” and then clicking on the “Manage Account Suspension” option.

Before you continue though, it pays to know what the effects of your actions are.

Effects of suspension

To make it easier to understand, the term “user” in the following sample situations refer to the username of an account.

Situation No. 1

For account suspensions that involves “SUSPENDED=1 and SUSPENDTIME=epochdate flags,” the system adds this to the “/var/cpanel/users/user/cpuser file.” The “epochdate” refers to the Unix time wherein you had the account suspended.

Account Limitation

WHM uses the appropriate interfaces to set the suspension of the account, while also listing the reason for its suspension.

Situation No. 2

In the event that you wish to suspend an account and you choose the option “Prevent resellers from unsuspending,” the action involves the “/var/cpanel/suspended/user.lock” file.

Account Limitation

In this situation, the WHM system blocks all processes associated with the suspended account. The appropriate interfaces locks the account and will prohibit resellers to have the account unsuspend.

The only person who can suspend the account after this is the root user.

Situation No. 3

The system stops and suspends all of the processes the account owns.

Account Limitation

Choosing this option will trigger the system to stops all functions currently performed by the logged-in cPanel account user. Some of the effects that may follow include forcibly logging out a user and stopping the cron jobs used by the logged out user.

Situation No. 4

Suspending an account may also result in the system creating a suspended.lists directory. It creates this directory in Mailman and transfers the files of all the accounts’ mailing lists into it.

Situation No. 5.

Another effect of suspending an account involves the system creating this directory: /etc/webdav/shadow. You will find this in the home directory of the suspended account.

Account Limitation

Once this takes effect, the account’s Web Disk will cease to function.

Situation No. 6

The /etc/shadow password files will have a “LOCKED” string attached to them. This will affect all of the email users associated with the suspended account.

Account Limitation

As a result, the email users of the suspended account will no longer have the ability to download mail. However, although suspended, the system will continue to send mail to the suspended account.

Situation No. 7

Suspension can also lead to the system prohibiting the sending of email via the mail server. This affects all of the accounts’ users. This will also result in the mail server causing all mails in the outbound message queue to ultimately fail.

Account Limitation

In other words, a suspended accounts’ user will no longer have the choice to send any emails, and any messages they have in their outbox queue will also fail.

There are plenty of other effects of suspending an account, so make sure you have the right reasons before doing so.