Categories
Plesk

How would you improve Parallels Plesk Control Panel

I’ve used Plesk for over 6 years now, and have grown to rely heavily upon this web server control panel to manage my 3 production web servers – currently hosting around 400 sites.

The interface has always remained fairly consistent, despite the odd hiding of reporting buttons and moving of icons – but several things have always bugged me…

  • Why can’t I enable FTP backup for all clients in batch, or enable for all domains by default
  • Why can’t I report or notify on success or failure of backups
  • I missed out on switching to Power User view when initializing the server – now I seem to be stuck with the Reseller mode

Let me know in the comments how you would change Plesk.

Categories
CentOS HowTo Guides Linux Plesk

1and1 default Plesk partition – resizing guide

1and1 have been regularly criticized for their unusual partitions on default installations of their dedicated servers – but this is the first time I have been affected. One of our dedicated servers started producing Postfix SMTP errors – caused by low disk space.

Upon investigation, the default partitions on my 1&1 Plesk 10.4 server came set at 4Gb, and my ‘var’ partition was full. The used space is all genuine files, so my only option was to increase the partition. On Windows this is quite a complex procedure, requiring additional applications – however following a simple guide made this a 5 minute procedure. Here are the steps that I took

Categories
HowTo Guides Linux Plesk

Plesk API vulnerability – allow anonymous hacker

Great… Nice start to the day, received an email from Parallels regarding a vulnerability within all Plesk Panel versions below 10.4 which allow anonymous access to the server!

http://kb.parallels.com/en/113321

In a nutshell – if your server is running below 10.4 – you are at risk and MUST update. I have 3 Plesk servers, 10.4 / 9.5.4 / 8.6.0 – so I was able to carry out the “Micro updates” (MU), versions other than this required a manual patch (unless you opt to go upto the highest subversion to get the MU).

Categories
CentOS Linux Plesk

MySQL 5.5 update breaks scheduled backups

Found that a recent update of our Plesk 9.5.4 server had broken the scheduled backups although manual backups were still working fine. Its seems that after updating PHP to 5.3 and MySQL to version 5.5 the Plesk Backup Manager was erroring

Categories
Linux Plesk

Plesk IMAP connection limit from single IP

Plesk has a built-in limit of 4 concurrent connections to IMAP from a single IP, so if you have more than 4 users – or more than 4 accounts which connect back to your Plesk server from any 1 IP – your users will get a Send/Receive error.

Categories
CentOS Linux Plesk

Segmentation fault for backupmng

After a recent upgrade to Plesk 9.5 for Linux, I started receiving the following error messages on a daily basis :

/bin/sh: line 1: 2462 Segmentation fault /usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/backupmng> /dev/null 2>&1;

It seems that, when Plesk performs a backup using backupmng utility, there is an error, and you may find errors simliar to below in /var/log/messages log file :

Mar 24 01:33:02 : backupmng[30573]: segfault at 0000000000000010 rip 00000039b6a4a855 rsp 00007fff4fa91710 error 4

Resolution – provided by Plesk

Fixed backupmng utility for CentOS 5 and Debian 5 in attached file.

For fix installation replace %plesk_dir%/admin/sbin/backupmng file by file from attach and correct owner and permissions, it should be root:root, 750.

A simple command to ensure permissions are correct; chown and chmod:

chown root:root /usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/backupmng
chmod 750 /usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/backupmng

Note: %plesk_dir% is environment variable which points to Plesk installation folder. By default it is /usr/local/psa/

Attachments:

backupmng.zip(106Kb)

http://kb.parallels.com/9351