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Disable Basic Auth For Virtual Path On Plesk

By on February 16, 2018 in Apache, Nginx, Plesk

In a recent case we needed to allow request to a particular virtual URL path on a site that was password protected with HTTP Basic Auth. The site was hosted on a Linux server with Plesk, nginx and Apache.  Typically this problem is solved by adding a “Satisfy Any” to the .htaccess in the directory that you want to remove authentication. But this does not work if the path is virtual instead of a physical directory path. Additionally we needed to allow access for a list of IP addresses. We tried an number of different solutions and ended up with the following:

Step 1 – The HTTP Basic Auth and IP access controls are configured in the .htaccess file like this:

Step 2 – In Plesk under:

Add the following block:

where “/excluded/path” is the virtual URL to be allowed access and “x.x.x.x” is the IP address assigned to the site.

When a request comes is received, nginx looks for the path and adds the AUTH_OVERRIDE header. Then the request is passed to Apache which processes the .htaccess file. The AUTH_OVERRIDE header is converted to an “AUTH_REQUEST” environment variable and allow without authentication by the “allow from env=” rule.

There may be better ways to accomplish this solution but this is one that we successfully implemented.

 

 

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Mixing Basic Auth And IP Access Controls

By on February 10, 2016 in Apache, Nginx

In some cases you might want to require HTTP Basic authentication to a site but allow specific IP addresses to skip the username/password. For Apache this can be configured with:

For nginx the configuration is:

 

 

 

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Plesk 12.5 Protected Directories Break Nginx/PHP-FPM

By on November 27, 2015 in Nginx, Plesk

On Plesk 12.5, when using PHP-FPM with Nginx there’s a problem with the way protected directories are implemented. Each protected directory creates a “location” block in the Nginx config that proxies to Apache. So protected directories are implemented in Apache only. Nginx just passes through to Apache.  This is not a great design choice in our opinion. Instead protected directories should be implemented directly in Nginx.

One of the side effects of the 12.5 implementation is that inside protected directories Apache handles PHP even if you have the domain configured to use Nginx with PHP-FPM. This is especially problematic if you have the entire site password protected. The “location /” block takes precedence over the “location *.php” block so the entire sites ends up using Apache instead going directly to PHP-FPM.

To get around this problem I do the following in Plesk:

  1. Create a protected directory for “/protected”.  Add users as needed.
  2. On the “Apache & nginx Settings” screen, add the following to the “Additional nginx directives” field:
  3. In your .htaccess file add:

The last step is important because we need both Apache and Nginx to enforce the protected directory.

 

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MariaDB on CentOS 7 – “Error in accept: Too many open files”

By on August 28, 2015 in CentOS, MariaDB, Nginx

By default is seems the soft and hard open files limits on MariaDB in CentOS 7 are 1024 and 4096 respectfully. You can see these limits by first getting the process ID:

And then looking at the limits in the proc filesystem:

You’ll see something like this:

Notice the numbers for “Max open files”.

If you run into problems with MariaDB failing and you see errors like this in the log:

Then you need to increase the open files limits by editing:

and adding this line:

to the “[Service]” section. Then reload the systemctl daemon:

and restart the MariaDB service:

Now the limit will be increased.  For example:

UPDATE: We’ve seen similar problems with nginx. The solution is similar … increase the limits for the nginx service.

UPDATE: As noted by Bastiaan Welmers in the comments, it better to copy the service control file then to edit:

UPDATE: 

As describe here:

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/systemd-understanding-and-administering/#_modifying_existing_systemd_services

Create an override file with:

or:

Put the modified settings in the override file:

Reload systemd config:

And restart mariadb:

UPDATE:

On server with Plesk, view the current open files limit with:

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Force HTTP On Nginx

By on August 20, 2015 in Nginx

Simple configuration line to redirect HTTPS requests to HTTP:

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