Plesk 11 Setup Tips Please

[laughingbuddha]

Hello,

Well my old server bless it finally gave up on Friday when both u320 scsi drives in the array failed. So right now I'm setting up a Plesk AWS install on EC2 to keep things going, whist I look at a new box/hard drives depending.

Question is, I've been stuck on Plesk 8.6 for so long now, and a little new to Plesk 11. Any setup tips/recommendations above the standard settings I should be using?

Would love your feedback oh mighty gurus

[biggles]

+1 one from me! In the exact same situation here... All tips and tricks highly appreciated!

[faris]

Set your Service Plans for your Subscriptions to 1 domain per Subscription

When you convert Clients and Domains to Customers and Subscriptions, sometimes a customer/domain won't convert. Just move that domain to be under your own user (Customer), then move them back and all will be well.

Limits in 10 and 11 actually work better than in 8.x, so you may find customer moaning that they can't receive email / upload files.

Port something or other needs to be open to allow access to the plesk updater in 11. I forget what. It isn't needed in 8.6.

You'll see lots of errors during user import/migration. Some are benign.

Expect some SSL certificates to go adrift -- just rekey them and install them again.

Switch all users to php-fcgi as soon as you can but warn users that the ftp user will be the php user not apache.

Umm......I have a document I wrote on Migrating from 8.6 to 10.4.4. The basics are the same for 11. I don't know how useful it might be. Its best bit is a list of Migration errors and what to do about them. If you aren't migrating it is probably useless. PM me if you want a copy.

[faris]

WARNING: You can't move Subscriptions between Resellers. It is a one-way street. Don't use them if you don't have to.

[laughingbuddha]

Cheers for the tips faris.

I've got a few questions regarding server setup. I can't remember what I had the mail server set to.

I've got Relying set to "authorization is required", with "POP3 before SMTP" and "SMTP" ticked. The bit I'm unsure about is SPF spam protection. I've got "Only create Received-SPF headers, never block" selected with SPF local rules set to "v=spf1 a mx ip4: enter your 54.217.228.212 ~all". Plus DNS zones for DNSBL service set to "sbl.spamhaus.org;zen.spamhaus.org".

I've not installed ART yum channel yet, or clam and such as I've got a temp AWS Plesk 11 instance running, whilst I sort out new drives or a new server. Not even sure how or if I can use the ART yum channel.

One other thing, it keeps going on about service plan being "Unsynced", something to do with Hard disk quota, but I really have no idea what they're going on about.

Plesk 8.6 seem sooooo much simpler

[faris]

Regarding things like SPF ... I'd say "one thing at a time". Get it running and accepting email, in as vanilla fashion as possible. In that way, if a customer has a problem there will be less to investigate. Indeed, I have not bothered with Plesk's SPF stuff on our systems - I let spamassassin handle that by adding a score on spf fail (default config -- no changes needed).

I would UNTICK POP3 before SMTP. If you had it ticked on your old system, tell customers that from now on they have to authenticate if they want to send. It will cause you problems for a few days with people calling to tell you they can't send email all of a sudden, but all they have to do is change their settings to do a full auth (or do this after things have settled down).

I don't think you want sbl AND zen? Only zen. That contains everything you need. Check the spamhaus website.

The service plan synch thing is actually the most powerful and compelling new feature in 10/11.

It is possible that what I'm about to explain is actually not what's happening in your case, so if it doesn't make sense then we are talking about something different:

A Service Plan contain a set of limits. When you set up a Subscription, you chose a Service Plan to associate with it. The Limits of the Service Plan then apply to that Subscription.

If you change the Limits in the Service Plan, ALL Subscriptions associated with that Service Plan have their limits automatically changes at the same time to those new limits EXCEPT:

1) If you have manually modified any limits or settings for a particular individual Subscription, that Subscription becomes "Locked", and any changes to its associated Service Plan are ignored. If you click on the Unlock and Sync option that will be visible in such situations, the Subscription's limits will be synchronised with the associated Service Plan.

2) If you reduce a Limit on a Service Plan (e.g disk space) but a Subscription associated with that Service Plan already uses more space than the limit allows ... I'm not sure what happens -- I think you get a red question mark when you hover over the Subscription.

Does any of this help?

[laughingbuddha]

Thanks dude. Can I still install Clamd and that on the box? If so, how. I'm currently re-installing my server with CentOS 6.4 and Plesk 11. The AWS Plesk 11 setup is having all sorts of issues with email ether not coming in, or sent email not going out. Plus there bloody stupid email throttling, that you can only lift by request.

Cloud my arse. I'll stick to dedicated.

[faris]

Yup, it should be safe enough to install clamav, qmail-scanner and spamassassin once you have installed all the MUs for whatever Plesk release you are using. If it is 11.5, keep in mind that not that many people have tested this configuration yet. I've not seen anyone say "ART qmail scanner works with 11.5's qmail installation". But then again I've not seen anyone say it doesn't, either

[prupert]

Note that Plesk standardizes on Postfix and will drop support for Qmail in the near future. See http://www.parallels.com/products/plesk/lifecycle/

[laughingbuddha]

Cool thanks guys. You've been a big help.

If I need anything more I'll post in here.

Big love!

[faris]

Note that Plesk standardizes on Postfix and will drop support for Qmail in the near future. See http://www.parallels.com/products/plesk/lifecycle/

I've been warning about this for a while now. But it is still TBD.

Postfix is superior to qmail, according to the majority of experts I have come across, and is still being regularly updated. But although there's a qmail-scanner equivalent for Postfix (does anybody use it?), there does not appear to be any equivalent for spamdyke + spamdyke plesk GUI that I know of. This is the real problem for us - we love spamdyke and haggybear's GUI and I'm not sure I can live without it. If anybody knows of anything similar, please shout.

But we are going off-topic......sorry lb

[laughingbuddha]

Well I've just completed the OS install, and Plesk (latest) is installing now.

I've not added the ART/ASL yum channel yet, is it still going? If so, how do I add that to my box for clam, qmail and spamassassin? It's been a little while (2008) since I've done it.

To think about it I also need to work out how to add my IPs back on, and get hold of Scott/support so I can pop my ASL subscription back on.

[laughingbuddha]

Hi guys,

I tried installing clamd from the atomic repo, and I'm getting the following error when trying to start it, even after reboot:

Code: Select all

[root@s1 clamav]# service clamd start
Starting Clam AntiVirus Daemon: LibClamAV Error: cli_loaddb(): No supported database files found in /var/clamav
ERROR: Can't open file or directory
                                                           [FAILED]

Any ideas?

[laughingbuddha]

Ignore that, I didn't realise you had to fire off freshclam as a one off, before the service can be started.

My bad, I'll update my install guide I wrote a while back.

[laughingbuddha]

Hey guys,

I'm thinking of leaving DNS zones for DNSBL service blank. It's currently set to "zen.spamhaus.org" but I've had the odd user reporting problems sending emails. Outlook with one client is kicking out the following error when trying to send "The server respnded: rblsmtpd: my-severs-ip pid 8929: 451 http://www.spamh".

I'm wonder if the DNSBL setting is the cause of the error.