iptables Archives

How to set firewall rules from a GUI in CentOS

Sick and tired of countless command line statements to set your firewall rules? Me too. No matter what I try, I never get the results quite right. There’s always some switch I forget and ultimately something isn’t working. For years I was thinking, “there has to be an easier way, like there is in Plesk”? … Read more

How to allow passive FTP connections in Plesk on Amazon EC2

AWS LogoPassive FTP connections should work out of the box in Plesk. If no other firewall or NAT is interfering with it.

I’ve recently noticed that when I install Plesk on Amazon EC2 every passive FTP connection fails with an error such as “Server sent passive reply with unroutable address. Passive mode failed.”

The reason for this mishap is twofold:

EC2 instances are behind a NAT, and therefore have an internal (unroutable) IP, and an external (public) IP. When a passive connection request comes in, ProFTP – Plesk’s default FTP Server – tells the connecting client its internal private IP address, and in turn quite rightly fails to connect to it.

On top of that, we need to make sure to open a range of ports we want to use for passive FTP connections and tell ProFTP only to use those.

Let’s do all this this step by step!

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How to open the web interface ports for Plesk on CentOS

After installing Parallels Plesk on a fresh server you may need to open ports 8443 and 8447 to access the web interface. These ports are not open by default. If your installation went fine but you can’t access Plesk in your browser via https://yourdomain.com:8443 then it’s likely that those ports aren’t open. Port 8443 is … Read more

How to install Plesk on CentOS 6

The other day I got myself a brand new server – so barebones that I had to do everything myself, including picking a Linux distribution. Sadly the one I wanted (CentOS 6) did not come bundled with Plesk so I had to install it manually.

I thought I’d better take some notes so I can retrace my steps.

At the time of writing, Plesk 10.3 is current, with 10.4 just around the corner. Keep this in mind – things tend to change drastically with every major release.

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