Server Name Indication (SNI) in Plesk 10.2

[breun]

According to the announcement of the final preview of Plesk 10.2 this release comes with support for IPv6 and SNI.

I assume SNI is Server Name Indication, which makes it possible to use multiple SSL certificates with a single IP address. In these times of IPv4 shortage and slow IPv6 adoption this sounds like is a pretty interesting feature. However, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Nam ... on#Support SNI requires Apache 2.2.12 or the experimental mod_gnutls. I'm wondering if this will work on EL5 then, since that comes with Apache 2.2.3 and I don't think SNI support is backported to that version by Red Hat. (And how about EL4?)

Has anyone tried the Plesk 10.2 preview yet and found out how SNI is implemented?

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Nam ... No_support SNI also needs browser support and most notably IE on Windows XP and Safari on Windows XP apparently don't support it. (Nor does Konqueror/KDE, wget and a couple of others.) Sounds like a show stopper for most sites at this time.

[paulie]

In what will probably turn out to be just an unpleasant diversion I'm attempting to install it on my home 32-bit OpenVZ server (I'll be highly amused if it will install on this but won't on Virtuozzo 4.0). I assume its the IPv6 support thats preventing installation on Virtuozzo 4.0 (so that'll be a stern email to our customers warning them not to click the autoinstaller button!).

The release notes for SNI on 10.2 specify :

CentOS 5.0 or later (only with Apache, PHP, and OpenSSL supplied with Panel).

But the help files don't mention CentOS at all : http://download1.parallels.com/Plesk/PP ... =68308.htm

Also worth noting is that the installer dialogue defaults to installing MySQL server 5.1...

I'll let you know how I get on (probably in a week's time!)

Paul.

[breun]

If Plesk suddenly started distributing its own Apache, PHP, OpenSSL and MySQL packages, that would be news... (And I'm not sure if I like that news.) Thanks for sharing for findings, keep us posted!

[scott]

Actually we were discussing distributing the versions from atomic.

[breun]

We = Atomicorp and Parallels?

[scott]

yeah, for the obvious distros of course. They did ask if I was going to do anything for the others, and as of right now the answer to that is no. More because I havent got a grip on what kind of build automation is available for them than anything else.

[paulie]

Hi,

Going back to Plesk 10.2, the install worked fine on OpenVZ once I'd remembered all the command line options to do things like increase disk space! However I've since had to shut down the server as where I keep it is about to become a bathroom so thats limited my testing. I'm pretty sure that on Centos 5.5 it did not install the required packages for SNI so I may take a look at that later.

My fundamental problem with 10 is that I cannot get my head around Services Plans and Subscriptions, every time someone tries to explain it to me my eyes glaze over!

Paul.