Month: March 2014

How to allow passive FTP connections in Plesk on Amazon EC2

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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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The Postfix Cheat Sheet

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I recently had some trouble with my postfix mail service. Not knowing where to being looking for log files and restart commands, I thought this quick cheat sheet would come in handy in the future: Starting and Stopping On CentOS we can speak to postfix like this: postfix start postfix stop postfix reload The this … Read more

How to use Bind Mounting in Linux

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Bind Mounting allows us to make one directory accessible from more than one location. It’s like “intercepting” directory1 and making the system redirect requests to directory2. Let’s take a look how to set this up and why we may want to use this technique. Quick Refresher: Device Mounting Perhaps you’re familiar with mounting devices to … Read more

How to change the default directory for backups in Plesk

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By default the Backup Manager in Plesk stores local backups in /var/lib/psa/dumps. You can change this location by editing /etc/psa/psa.conf. Find the following block in the file: # Backups directory DUMP_D /var/lib/psa/dumps DUMP_TMP_D /tmp Change the path for DUMP_D to your new desired location, then restart Plesk for the changes to take effect: service psa … Read more

How to install Apache mod_pagespeed on CentOS with Plesk

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Apache-LogoI bumped into Kristian Markroft from Simplyroot in New Orleans last week, and he told me about an interesting speed-up module for the Apache Webserver.

mod_pagespeed is an open source project which speeds up page loads without having to change the code of the actual page. mod_pagespeed does this by adding filters before pages are served. For example it will resize images and minify CSS/JS files, which can speed up page load considerably. The project is hosted on Google Code:

Let’s see how we can install it on CentOS, test to see if it works and how to manage it in Plesk.

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