Reliable Penguin – Blog

Plesk 10 has a bug (feature?) where it inserts this line into the crontab file for each user (including non-chrooted users): SHELL=/usr/local/psa/bin/chrootsh This effectively breaks the jobs, because it makes them try to run in a chroot jail, which won’t work. You can manually remove the lines but Plesk will restore them when the job [...]

Plesk 10 has a bug (feature?) where it inserts this line into the crontab file for each user (including non-chrooted users):

SHELL=/usr/local/psa/bin/chrootsh

This effectively breaks the jobs, because it makes them try to run in a chroot jail, which won’t work. You can manually remove the lines but Plesk will restore them when the job is edited. A workaround, is to run this command on the server:

/usr/local/psa/bin/server_pref -u -crontab-secure-shell /bin/sh

That changes the SHELL setting to a normal default value, which should run the jobs correctly. This is not a great fix, because it probably messes up cronjobs for users who really are chrooted but it may be useful to some.

–ben

On versions prior to Plesk 10, you can find the Plesk admin password in: /etc/psa/.psa.shadow For Plesk 10 and beyond, use this command instead: /usr/local/psa/bin/admin –show-password Even more interesting is the MySQL admin password. For all versions of Plesk, the MySQL admin password is the string contained in /etc/psa/.psa.shadow. In Plesk 10, the password is [...]

On versions prior to Plesk 10, you can find the Plesk admin password in:

/etc/psa/.psa.shadow

For Plesk 10 and beyond, use this command instead:

/usr/local/psa/bin/admin --show-password

Even more interesting is the MySQL admin password. For all versions of Plesk, the MySQL admin password is the string contained in /etc/psa/.psa.shadow. In Plesk 10, the password is the hashed value stored in this file.

Plesk is a popular web hosting control panel used by many of our clients. On servers with Plesk, the control panel is located at: https://yourdomain.com:8443 There are several problems with this URL: 1. It’s hard for users to remember the 8443 on the end and the https on the beginning of the URL. 2. Plesk [...]

Plesk is a popular web hosting control panel used by many of our clients. On servers with Plesk, the control panel is located at:

https://yourdomain.com:8443

There are several problems with this URL:

1. It’s hard for users to remember the 8443 on the end and the https on the beginning of the URL.

2. Plesk by default uses a self signed SSL certificate that causes warning to be displayed in the user’s web browser.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could put Plesk on a friendly URL like https://plesk.yourdomain.com?

Also lets have:

http://plesk.yourdomain.com

automatically redirect to:

https://plesk.yourdomain.com.

Now the your users don’t have to remember the https part either.

Now lets get really fancy. Suppose your customer has a domain named acme.com hosted on your server. It would be nice to have the URL:

http://acme.com/plesk

redirect to:

http://plesk.yourdomain.com.

Guess what – it can all be done! Here’s how:

1. Get an SSL certificate for plesk.yourdomain.com. A $29 cert from GoDaddy will work just fine. Place the SSL key in:

/etc/pki/tls/private/plesk.yourdomain.com.key

and the SSL certificate in:

/etc/pki/tls/certs/plesk.yourdomain.com.crt

2. Next, create /etc/httpd/conf.d/plesk_proxy.conf with the following contents:

Redirect permanent /plesk https://plesk.yourdomain.com

<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerName plesk.yourdomain.com
   Redirect permanent / https://plesk.yourdomain.com
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:8444>
   ServerName plesk.yourdomain.com
   ErrorLog logs/plesk_proxy.error_log
   CustomLog logs/plesk_proxy.access_log common

   SSLEngine on
   SSLProtocol all -SSLv2
   SSLCipherSuite ALL:!aNULL:!ADH:!eNULL:!LOW:!EXP:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM
   SSLCertificateFile /etc/pki/tls/certs/plesk.yourdomain.com.crt
   SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/pki/tls/private/plesk.yourdomain.com.key

   ProxyRequests Off
   <Proxy *>
      Order deny,allow
      Allow from all
   </Proxy>

   SSLProxyEngine On
   ProxyPass / https://127.0.0.1:8443/
   ProxyPassReverse / https://127.0.0.1:8443/
</VirtualHost>

Now just restart Apache and you’re ready to go.

Couple of issues to note:

1. You’ll need to add the hostname plesk.yourdomain.com to DNS.
2. Depending on your server config, you may need to place plesk.yourdomain.com on a dedicated IP address since each IP address can host only a single SSL site.