Plesk Archives

I love Plesk – it’s a work of art that makes my life easier. Rather than a “programme” as such, it’s a web interface that takes control of several thousand services on a web server and makes administering domains and hosting a breeze.

Since 2012 I’ve been a certified Parallels Plesk Automation Technician.

How to avoid emails from Dr. Web

by

Dr. Web is a Russian anti-virus utility that comes bundled with Plesk. It’s good and it tries to keep the bad guys out.

To keep up with all the mutations out there it tries to update itself frequently. B default, Plesk sends the system admin an email when this happens – no matter if Dr. Web was successful or if there was a problem.

This is what a sample email looks like:

/etc/cron.daily/drweb-update:

Dr.Web update details:
Update server: http://update.us1.drweb.com/plesk/700/unix
Update has begun at Thu May 17 03:37:07 2011
Update has finished at Thu May 17 03:38:16 2011

Following files have been updated:
	/var/drweb/bases/drwdaily.vdb
	/var/drweb/bases/drwtoday.vdb
	/var/drweb/bases/dwmtoday.vdb
	/var/drweb/bases/dwntoday.vdb
	/var/drweb/bases/dwrtoday.vdb
	/var/drweb/bases/timestamp
	/var/drweb/updates/timestamp

Multiply that email by the number of servers you’re looking after, and you’ll soon have an overflowing inbox.

Here’s the solution: tweak a system file and divert those emails to nowhere.

Read more

How to install Plesk on CentOS 6

by

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.

Read more

How to amend an Application Vault Repository in Plesk

by

I’m currently building a WordPress Hosting Service where customers get hosting with WordPress pre-installed.

I also want to offer several pre-installed Themes and Plugins that I’ll deploy from the Plesk Back End using Application Vault.

WordPress is already available as a free repository, however it does take some time for new versions to be made available – and of course my Themes and Plugins aren’t there either.

So how can I amend or build a new Plesk Application Vault repository? Let’s find out in this article, in which I’m describing all my findings 😉

Read more

When Plesk fails to upgrade

by

I’ve had this issue before: you get a new server, the image is a few revisions behind the current release and your first line of business is to upgrade the system.

A few minutes later you check and find that Plesk refuses to start. Bugger. Now what?

My Customer Support Gurus always know what to do, but in an effort to not disturb them at night here’s what they did to make it all work again. These instructions work on a CentOS 5 system with Plesk 9.0.1 installed.

Read more

How to install Parallels Plesk on a new Linux server

by

So I’ve expanded my server arsenal to a fifith machine with Strato in Germany. Sadly they only offer an OpenSUSE installation bundled with Plesk (in German – unchangeable to English).

What I really wanted was another CentOS system though, which Strato offer – but without Plesk installed.

After a bit of hackage, I found out that it’s very easy to install Plesk from the command line via the Parallel’s Auto Installer.

These instructions should work on any distribution of Linux – just make sure you download the right auto installer package from the Parallels site (you need to create an account with them and log in for this link to work).

Read more

Where are the Backup Files in Plesk?

by

By default, they’re located in /var/lib/psa/dumps It’s useful to clear this directory out every once in a while, especially because Plesk doesn’t overwrite old backups. So if you ever find that you’re using 60GB of storage on your system, but are fully aware that your entire site shouln’t be bigger than 100MB, then this is … Read more