Plesk Links

SW-Soft, the makers of Plesk, have a good set of information on using Plesk.  The following are some of their more valuable resources:

• SW-Soft Manuals
• SW-Soft Forums
• Plesk Flash Tutorials

MySQL Passwords on Plesk

Note that the 'root' MySQL user is renamed to 'admin' when using Plesk.  The password will match your Plesk 'admin' password.

Plesk and Tomcat or JBoss

Plesk integrates with Tomcat 4. It allows your control panel users to upload WAR files from the UI and deploy webapps.  It uses its own Tomcat 4 setup and mod_webapp.

When we perform a Plesk install we remove the regular RimuHosting Tomcat 5 setup and use the Plesk install instead.  That install puts the software under /var/tomcat4.  You can start/stop Tomcat using: /etc/init.d/tomcat4 start/stop (or just use the Plesk control panel to do it).

If you need to use Tomcat 5 or JBoss on a server with Plesk, you can do so.  But Plesk will not offer a UI to manage those web applications.  Instead you follow the same setup procedures, per our HOWTOs, for a non-Plesk server.  For example, setup the virtual host (domain) using Plesk.  Then edit the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf Virtual Host directive to add your mod_proxy_ajp directive.  Then use scp to copy the webapp war file to the Tomcat or JBoss webapps or deploy directory.

To avoid confusion, you may wish to remove Plesk's Tomcat 4 setup.  You can do this by running:

apt-get remove psa-tomcat-configurator tomcat4 tomcat4-admin-webapps tomcat4-webapps xerces-j

Since we remove our Tomcat 5 setup when we install Plesk, please let us know on the order confirmation page if you wish to use Tomcat 5 in preference to Tomcat 4.

Using FTP

Go to Clients > My Domains.  Click on the blue VR button.  Set an FTP username and password (FrontPage user details can be set here as well.  Then ftp to your domain name (or IP) and use those details to log in.  Also, remember you - the admin of the server - can also use scp.

Resolving a "/mod_ssl:error:HTTP-request" Error

Are you getting an error like this when you connect to your Plesk control panel? You don't have permission to access /mod_ssl:error:HTTP-request on this server. .  In that case you are probably using a http URL and you need to change that to a https URL, specifically: https://yourip:8443.

Using a Secondary Name Server with Plesk

Plesk runs its own DNS server.  It is good to use Plesk's DNS server since Plesk updates it automatically when domains are created in the control panel.

It is also useful to have a DNS server that runs on a server other than the one with which you are actually hosting the site.

One option is to use RimuHosting's DNS servers as secondary servers.

By default Plesk will not permit 'zone transfers'.  A secondary (or slave) server needs to be able to do a 'zone transfer' in order to get DNS information from it's Plesk master.

On Plesk (it may just be on version 7.5 and later) you can go to Server > DNS > Allow Transfer ACL and add your secondary name servers IP addresses.  Run (from your VPS command line) host dnsservername (e.g. ns1.rimuhosting.com) to get the IP address for that secondary name server.

After you add the ACL entry that server can request a 'zone transfer' and get updated with your IP address details.

If you are using RimuHosting's name servers as the secondary servers, then add a zone for every domain you are hosting with Plesk.  Then for each zone go to the RimuHosting control panel url then go to: Home > Control Panel > Zone List > Zone: yourzonename > Convert Zone to a Slave/Secondary Zone.  Then enter your VPS' IP address as the master server IP.

Then ns1.rimuhosting.com will refresh itself with name data for your VPS' Plesk name server.  If the RimuHosting name servers do not load the domains' information, then please check the ACL setting in Plesk.

You will also need to tell your registrar to use your VPS' IP and the secondary name server (e.g. ns1.rimuhosting.com) for each of the zones you have setup on the Plesk server.  If your domain name registrar will not accept your VPS' IP, you will need to have then setup a host record.

Resolving: Locked User Accounts

If you get the password wrong a few times when you log into the Plesk control panel you will get locked out for a period of time.  If you are impatient to get in, you can run this (from an SSH prompt):

mysql -u admin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` -e "delete from lockout" psa

Copy and paste the command as it appears here.  For example, the character before the cat command is a backtick not an apostrophe.  The backtick means "execute the following command and substitute the contents of the backtick with the commands output".  The /etc/psa/.psa.shadow file contains the Plesk and MySQL admin user password.

Plesk Migrations

<p>When moving from an older version of Plesk to a newer one, we've found the migration manager works better than restoring from psa dump files.  After a migration if the "disk usage" column is showing zero for all of you domains in the domains list, see this forum post.