Plesk No-Longer Selling Plesk pre 9.5.x

[laughingbuddha]

Hi all,

Did anyone read the recent email from Parallels announcing the end of purchase ability of Plesk pre 9.5.x. It appears that you will no-longer be able to purchase the older versions, which has left me wondering, does this effect my lease licence?

I run Plesk 8.6, mainly because I've heard of so many horror stories of Plesk upgrades gone wrong, and as I only have the one server live, I can't afford to be dealing with a mangled software upgrade.

[faris]

No, you are OK on 8.6 leased.

But it is time to go 10.x now. We're taking the plunge in the next 30 days.

[Kalimari]

Agree with faris - stuck with Plesk 9.5.x for ages for the same reason (and with 8.6 before that), but recently had to take the plunge with Plesk 10 on a new CentOS 6 server set-up.

There are some pretty massive UI and under-the-hood changes between Plesk 8, 9 & 10, but the transition has been hassle free (after a bit of configuration and adjustment). Plesk 10.4.4 seems pretty stable and in some cases better organised/more flexible than 9 (paths for hosting/user+ftp accounts/apache modules configured in GUI).

Running Qmail/Spamassassin (from testing-repo)/Spamdyke (installed via rpm, as not in CentOS 6 atomic repo) and all perform well in Plesk 10.4.4, with several mail heavy domains running without issue. Moving demanding PHP/MySQL sites this weekend (tests have been OK).

However, I'd never make an upgrade of this magnitude on a production server, but I recommission new servers every 24 months and migrate websites (manually via SCP as opposed to Plesk back-up solution).

Details on Parallels/Plesk EOL are here: http://www.parallels.com/uk/products/plesk/lifecycle

[laughingbuddha]

Ah right.

I'm a little concerned with updating Plesk, as I fear it will break something. A jump from 8.6 to 10 is bound to have some issues.

I've got a site/service on the server, admittedly in development, that uses wildcard DNS for dynamic subdomains.
I also have a few WordPress installs, and a PHP driven SMS service that uses a lot of CURL and JSON to send and receive XML based responses from gateway services.

The server itself is a HP Poliant DL360 G3 with two Xeon 2.80GHZ processors and 4GB of memory. The Xeon's don't support 64bit OS, so I'm running an ART i686 PAE kernal.
The server was a referb when I bought it 3 years ago. I replaced the memory and both HDD's with new ones, as I prefer to do that even with a referb server, and I fitted a new SCSI drive last year when one of them failed. It's running RAID, so nothing was lost.

I'm planning to replace this server with a G4 or G5 Poliant DL360 with around 16GB of memory, but that won't be for another 3-4 months yet.

[Kalimari]

Seems an ideal opportunity to configure a new (64-bit?) system with Plesk 10 and try it out before migrating sites across - and you'll still be doing it before Plesk 8 EOL in September.

Definitely wouldn't want to upgrade Plesk 8.6 > 9.X > 10.X in a production environment myself.

[faris]

Yup. Get yourself a new Centos 6 system up and running, stick Plesk 10.4.4.x on it and migrate customers one way or another. The key here is that you don't need to do all customers at once. Do them as and when you want. Leave the really hard ones until last, or do them first. Do X customers per day/Week, so if something does go wrong, you don't have all your customers calling you at once.

Kalimari, what do you do about site/user settings (e.g. email accounts/passwords, database users/passwords) if you use file copying as opposed to Plesk's migration manager or a backup/restore?

Faris.

[laughingbuddha]

I thought migration manager work well the last time I used it. Mind you I was porting users from a Plesk 7 or early version 8 VPS to my current Plesk 8.6 server.

Yeah I think the best bet as you guys have said is to wait. Only annoying thing is my IP's and name servers, although I'm considering not running any name servers on the new server, and just letting customers use their domain registrar's name servers. I did consider running 2 separate servers at one point, but considering what I earn from hosting, and the cost of co-location at my local server house, I think it is better just to have the one server only.

[Kalimari]

Kalimari, what do you do about site/user settings (e.g. email accounts/passwords, database users/passwords) if you use file copying as opposed to Plesk's migration manager or a backup/restore?

As faris highlighted, focus on a single domain transfer at a time. Never installed or used the migration manager, so the following is something I got used to years ago (before using Plesk) and I stick with it as it works well, every time, with no surprises.

1. Set-up domain (aliases/sub-domains) on new server with same ftp credentials.
2. Set-up database(s) on new server with same credentials.
3. Set-up mail accounts/aliases on new server (but switch off mail service initially).
4. gzip the contents of httpdocs on old server and scp transfer to new server and gunzip into httpdocs.
5. For e-commerce websites redirect all traffic to holding page on old server (to avoid duplicate order ids), not as essential for other CMS websites.
6. Dump database(s) and scp to new server and import.
7. Enable mail service on new server and switch off mail on old server or set forward to an alternate address, to ensure same server domain e-mail is delivered.

DNS changes can be made prior to this starting or after (depending upon the speed and nature of the change). Use third-party, external DNS and bring the TTL values down just prior to changes to shorten the transfer time (for the rest of world). Switching DNS provider on router or PC Network/DNS settings picks up new change almost immediately (for me/client).

Use a sub-domain on my domain per (important) website hosted for development purposes, which comes in very handy as it also allows an exiting website to be transferred and tested in new environment prior to full domain transfer.

Some useful commands:

Code: Select all

/* list FTP accounts */
SELECT REPLACE( sys_users.home, '/var/www/vhosts/', '' ) AS domain, sys_users.login, accounts.password
FROM `sys_users`
LEFT JOIN `accounts` USING( id )
ORDER BY sys_users.home ASC

Code: Select all

/* list mail accounts */
SELECT 
CONCAT( mail_name, '@', name ) AS username, 
password, name AS domain
FROM `mail`, `domains`, `accounts`
WHERE PASSWORD NOT LIKE '' AND mail.dom_id=domains.id AND mail.account_id=accounts.id
ORDER BY NAME, mail_name ASC

Code: Select all

/* dump databse on old server*/
mysqldump -uadmin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` -c -e --default-character-set=utf8 --skip-set-charset -B DBNAME > DBNAME.sql

/* transfer via scp, files can be gzipped before hand, have a user set-up specially for certificate auth */
scp DBNAME.sql un@newserver:~

/* import database on new server */
mysql -uadmin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` --default-character-set=utf8 DBNAME < DBNAME.sql