® Parallels Plesk Control Panel Parallels Plesk Control Panel 8.4 for Linux/Unix Administrator's Guide (Revision 1.0) Revision 1.
Copyright Notice ISBN: N/A Parallels 660 SW 39th Street Suite 205 Renton, Washington 98057 USA Phone: +1 (425) 282 6400 Fax: +1 (425) 282 6444 © Copyright 1999-2008, Parallels, Inc. All rights reserved Distribution of this work or derivative of this work in any form is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained from the copyright holder. Patented technology protected by U.S.Patents 7,328,225; 7,325,017; 7,293,033; 7,099,948; 7,076,633. Patents pending in the U.S.
Contents Preface 7 Who Should Read This Guide ....................................................................................................... 7 Typographical Conventions ........................................................................................................... 7 Feedback .......................................................................................................................................
Preface 4 Configuring Mailman Mailing List Software ....................................................................... 73 Preventing Your Customers From Sending Mass E-mail ................................................. 73 Configuring Plesk for Database Hosting ..................................................................................... 73 Setting Up Remote Database Hosting .............................................................................. 75 Managing Database Servers.........
Preface 5 Suspending and Unsuspending Mailboxes ..................................................................... 194 Removing Mailboxes ....................................................................................................... 195 Switching off the Mailbox Service When You Have Decided to Turn Your Account into a Mail Forwarder ........................................................................................................................
Preface 6 Removing a Server Record ....................................................................................................... 250 Upgrading Your Control Panel 251 Changing Updater Settings ....................................................................................................... 253 Blocking Access to Updater Functions from the Control Panel ................................................ 254 Appendix A. Advanced Features 255 Using Event Tracking Mechanism ................
Preface Preface In this section: Who Should Read This Guide ........................................................................... 7 Typographical Conventions ............................................................................... 7 Feedback ..........................................................................................................
Preface Preformatted Preformatted Bold On-screen computer output in your command-line sessions; source code in XML, C++, or other programming languages. What you type, contrasted with on-screen computer output. # ls –al /files total 14470 # cd /root/rpms/php CAPITALS Names of keys on the keyboard. SHIFT, CTRL, ALT KEY+KEY Key combinations for which the user must press and hold down one key and then press another.
CHAPTER 1 About Plesk Plesk is a hosting automation solution that gives hosting providers full control over the managed Web hosting servers and simplifies setup and management of user accounts, Web sites, and e-mail accounts.
About Plesk Overview of Business Model, Users Accounts and Permissions Plesk user accounts hierarchy is limited to four user levels: administrator account, client accounts, domain administrator accounts, e-mail user accounts. For your customers who need to resell hosting services or host numerous domains/web sites, you will create client accounts. Note: for the purpose of hosting your own sites, you should use a special service account which is created during Plesk setup.
About Plesk 11 The control panel does not have a built-in billing system, therefore, we recommend that you use a third-party solution of your choice, or use Plesk together with Parallels Business Automation solution.
About Plesk Overview of Software Components Managed by Plesk Plesk control panel works in cooperation with the following third-party software components and services: Bind DNS server Apache Web server ProFTPd FTP server MySQL and PostgreSQL database servers Qmail mail server Courier-IMAP IMAP/POP3 server Mailman mailing list server Spamassassin anti-spam software Dr.
CHAPTER 2 Getting Started This chapter describes the first actions you need to perform after installation of the Plesk Control Panel. In this chapter: Logging in to Plesk ............................................................................................ 14 Becoming Familiar with Plesk's Interface........................................................... 16 Changing Your Password and Contact Information ...........................................
Getting Started Logging in to Plesk To log in to your Plesk control panel: 1 Open your web browser, and in the address bar type the URL where your Plesk control panel is located. For example, https://your-domain.com:8443, where your-domain.com is the domain name of your Web host. 2 Press ENTER. Plesk login screen will open. 3 Type the user name 'admin' and your password into the Login and Password boxes, respectively.
Getting Started 15 You can skip this stage and define the type of IP addresses later (Server > IP Addresses). 11 In the Administrator's preferences section, change the default administrator password. Change the default administrator's password. Enter the new password and confirm it in the New password and Confirm password fields. The password can have up to 14 symbols. Note that the password is case sensitive.
Getting Started If You Forgot Your Password You can retrieve your forgotten password in any of the following ways: Look it up in the /etc/psa/.psa.shadow file on the server's file system. Use the password reminder in the control panel. To use the password reminder: 1 In your web browser‘s address bar, type the URL where your Plesk control panel is located (for example, https://your-domain.com:8443) 2 Press ENTER. Plesk login screen will open. 3 Click the Forgot your password? link.
Getting Started The desktop view can show server statistics and shortcuts to the operations you frequently perform—everything you may need can now be accessible from a single screen.
Getting Started You can switch between the views (by installing the appropriate license key) or use a combination of them for your control panel. You can also specify what view should be shown to other control panel users. To customize your control panel, refer to the Customizing the Control Panel (on page 48) chapter.
Getting Started 19 Using Wizards When you work with Plesk in the Desktop view, you accomplish the tasks you need through wizards. Each wizard is a series of consecutive screens. To accomplish a task using a wizard, follow the instructions displayed on the wizard screens. For information on individual options, refer to the respective sections of this guide. Items in the Standard View The navigation pane is located on the left. It gives you access to sets of administrative functions: Clients.
Getting Started Changing Your Password and Contact Information To update your contact information: 1 Select the Server shortcut in the navigation pane 2 Click the Edit icon in the Administrator information group. 3 Update your information as required, and click OK. To change your password: 1 2 3 4 Select the Server shortcut in the navigation pane Click the Change Password icon in the Administrator information group. Enter your old and new passwords. Click OK.
CHAPTER 3 Configuring Your Control Panel This chapter discusses the configuration steps required to set up and manage your Plesk Control Panel. In this chapter: Upgrading License Key for Your Control Panel ................................................. 22 Securing Your Control Panel ............................................................................. 25 Setting Up Global Account ................................................................................ 30 Customizing Your Control Panel..
Configuring Your Control Panel Upgrading License Key for Your Control Panel Plesk comes with a trial license key, which is automatically installed to the control panel. This license key allows you to create one user account, host one Web site and one mail box. Therefore, to fully use the Plesk Control Panel as you need, you should obtain a license key from Parallels or one of its resellers and install it to the control panel. Plesk license keys have a built-in expiration date.
Configuring Your Control Panel 23 Upgrading the Trial License Key To upgrade the trial license key: 1 Go to Server > License Management and click Order New Key. 2 The Parallels online store will open in a separate browser window. In this window, select the items and features you want to include into your Plesk license and click Submit. In the next steps, indicate the currency, number of license keys, provide contact details, billing address, and payment method, and submit the form.
Configuring Your Control Panel Installing Additional License Keys for Plesk Add-ons To install an additional license key for an add-on Plesk component: Click the Server shortcut in the navigation pane. Click the License Management icon in the System group. Click Order Control Panel Add-Ons. The Parallels online store page listing available add-ons will open in a separate browser window. On this page, select the add -ons you want to order and click Submit.
Configuring Your Control Panel Rolling Back to Your Previously Used License Key To roll back to the license key you previously used: 1 Click the Server shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the License Management icon in the System group. 3 Click Roll Back Key. The previously installed license key will be restored. Securing Your Control Panel In this section: Restricting Administrative Access to Control Panel ...........................................
Configuring Your Control Panel Restricting Administrative Access to Control Panel To alleviate security concerns, you may want to restrict administrative access to your control panel from specific IP addresses. To allow administrative access to control panel only from specific IP addresses or networks: 1 Go to Server > Access. 2 Click Add New Network and specify the required IP addresses. Click OK. To specify subnets, you can use wildcard symbols (*) and subnet masks.
Configuring Your Control Panel 27 Securing Communication to Server with SSL Encryption For security reasons, you can access your control panel only through a secure connection provided by Secure Sockets Layer-enabled hypertext transfer protocol. All data you exchange with the Plesk managed server are encrypted, thus preventing interception of sensitive information.
Configuring Your Control Panel 6 Register or log in to an existing MyPlesk.com account and you will be taken step by step through the certificate purchase procedure. 7 Choose the type of certificate that you wish to purchase. 8 Click Proceed to Buy and order the certificate. In the Approver E-Mail drop-down box, please select the correct Approver e-mail. The approver e-mail is an e-mail address that can confirm that certificate for specific domain name was requested by an authorized person.
Configuring Your Control Panel 29 8 Visit the Web site of the certification authority from which you want to purchase an SSL certificate, and follow the links on their site to start a certificate ordering procedure. When you are prompted to specify CSR text, paste the data from the clipboard into the online form and click Continue. The certification authority will create an SSL certificate in accordance with the information you supplied.
Configuring Your Control Panel Setting Up Global Account Global Account is a Single Sign-On technology feature that allows you to log in to different Parallels products using a single global login and password. If you have several accounts in Plesk, you can connect them all to a global account and switch between these accounts without entering a password every time.
Configuring Your Control Panel 31 Creating A Global Account To create a global account: 1 Log in to Plesk, go to Global Account and click Connect To Global Account. 2 Select Create new global account and provide the login and password for your global account. 3 Click OK. Your global account is active now, so you can proceed with connecting other accounts to it. Refer to Connecting Local Accounts to Your Global Account (on page 31) section for more information.
Configuring Your Control Panel Switching Between Accounts To switch to another account: 1 Click Switch User in the upper right corner. 2 Select the account you want to switch to: Choose the required local account from the list of accounts connected to your global account or Select Specify credentials for another account and provide login and password for a local account not connected to your global account or to another global account.
Configuring Your Control Panel 33 Disconnecting Local Accounts From Global Account To disconnect a local account from your global account: 1 Log in to Plesk under the local account you want to disconnect. 2 Go to Global Account and click Disconnect From Global Account. 3 Confirm the disconnection and click OK. Repeat steps 1-3 for other local accounts as necessary.
Configuring Your Control Panel In this section: Changing Interface Language and Skin............................................................. 35 Customizing the Control Panel in the Standard View......................................... 36 Customizing the Control Panel in the Desktop View ..........................................
Configuring Your Control Panel 35 Changing Interface Language and Skin To change the interface language and skin for your control panel and for your customers, follow these steps: 1 Go to Server > Control Panel > Server Preferences. 2 Specify the following: a Default locale. Select the interface language that will be set as default for new control panel users. b Default skin. Select the interface skin (theme) that will be set as default for new control panel users.
Configuring Your Control Panel h Apache restart interval. Any changes to hosting account settings made through control panel take effect only when Web server is restarted. By default, Web server is set to restart not more than once in every 15 minutes. This value is optimal for most cases, and we recommend leaving this default setting. Note that when there are no changes in hosting account settings, the Web server is not forced to restart. i Web and traffic statistics retention period.
Configuring Your Control Panel 37 Using Interface Customization Templates Interface customization templates are sets of interface customization options assigned to Plesk users. You can configure custom settings for interface elements and save these settings in a template. Then, you assign the template to specific client accounts. Default Customization Template is created automatically after Plesk installation.
Configuring Your Control Panel Creating Templates To create a template and specify custom rules for interface elements: 1 Go to Server > Interface Management > Interface Templates tab and click Add Interface Template. 2 On the next page, enter the name for the new template. This field is required. 3 Select the Default check box to make this template default. Remember that the default template is applied to all user accounts for which no other template is explicitly defined.
Configuring Your Control Panel 39 Assigning Templates to User Accounts To assign a template to your interface: 1 Go to Server > Edit. 2 In the Administrator's interface customization template menu, select the customization template you need and click OK. Note: In the list of templates, the template currently used for the administrator‘s interface is shown in italic. The default template name is displayed in bold. If you are using the default template, it is marked as bold italic.
Configuring Your Control Panel Changing Default Template To set another template as a default template: 1 Go to Server > Interface Management > Interface Templates tab. 2 Select a check box corresponding to the template you need. 3 Click Default. The selected template will be used for all users for which no template is explicitly defined.
Configuring Your Control Panel 41 Hiding and Unhiding Sets of Buttons You can easily hide predefined groups of buttons from the Plesk interface. In this case, users do not see the controls they are not allowed to operate or the features that are not supported (services not installed). To hide groups of buttons: 1 Click the Server shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the Interface Management icon in the Control Panel group. 3 Click the Interface templates tab.
Configuring Your Control Panel 4 Click the Preferences icon in the Tools group. 5 Clear the corresponding check boxes to make the hidden groups of buttons again visible in the interface. 6 Click OK.
Configuring Your Control Panel 43 Super Administrative Overrides The super administrator (root) can define a set of controls that are never shown in Plesk control panel, even to a user with administrative privileges (and even in the Customization mode). To do this: 1 Customize the interface through the Plesk control panel. 2 Create an empty file with name root.controls.lock in /plesk_installation_directory/var/.
Configuring Your Control Panel Country displays the countries where this language is native; Used displays the number of control panel users at all levels that use this language in their interface. To install a new language pack that you downloaded from Parallels Web site: 1 2 3 4 Click the Server shortcut in the navigation pane. Click the Interface Management icon in the Control Panel group. Click the Add Locale button.
Configuring Your Control Panel 45 To download a skin package: 1 Click the Server shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the Interface Management icon in the Control Panel group. 3 Click the Skins tab. 4 Click the appropriate icon, or click a skin title and then click Download Skin. 5 Select the type of archive you would like to have the skin files packed into, and click OK. Once the skin is prepared for downloading, a file download dialog window appears.
Configuring Your Control Panel Rebranding Your Control Panel with a Custom Logo Banner You can replace the default Plesk logo banner in the top frame with your own logo. It will be visible to your customers when they log in to their control panels. You can also make your logo a clickable hyperlink. You should use a GIF, JPEG or PNG format file for your logo, preferably not larger than 100 kilobytes to minimize the download time. It is recommended that you use an image of 50 pixels in height.
Configuring Your Control Panel 47 In the Context help tip contents input field, type in the help tip that will be displayed when you hover the mouse pointer over the button. Select the Open URL in the Control Panel check box if you wish the destination URL to be opened in the control panel's right frame, otherwise leave this check box unchecked to open the URL in a separate browser window.
Configuring Your Control Panel Customizing the Control Panel in the Desktop View To add or remove items from the desktop: 1 Go to Desktop > Customize Desktop. 2 Specify whether to show the Server Information group and what items to show there. Clearing check boxes will remove the respective items from the desktop. 3 Specify what tasks you would like to accomplish through the control panel. The appropriate shortcuts will be placed to the desktop.
Configuring Your Control Panel 1 On the desktop, click the icon corresponding to the shortcut that you wish to modify. 2 Modify the label and description as desired and click OK. To remove items from the Favorites group of the desktop: 1 On the desktop, click the shortcut that you wish to remove. 2 Click the Edit Favorite or Edit Shortcut icon in the upper right corner of the screen, then click Remove.
Configuring Your Control Panel Using Desktop Presets Alternately, you can modify items in the desktop view by modifying and applying desktop presets. The presets contain configurations of interface elements. You can have several presets for your interface and switch between them when needed. You can predefine the appearance of interface for your customers and customers of your resellers.
Configuring Your Control Panel 51 To customize desktop for your resellers and customers who have several domains (client accounts): 1 Go to Server > Interface Management > Desktop Presets tab and click the Default Client Desktop shortcut in the list of desktop presets. If you wish to create a new preset based on an existing one, click the corresponding icon. 2 Specify the configuration preset name. 3 Select the Default check box to apply this preset to the interface.
Configuring Your Control Panel 4 Specify what tasks you would like users to accomplish through the control panel. The appropriate shortcuts will be placed to the desktop. The Selected tasks list shows the tasks for which shortcuts are already placed on the desktop. The Available tasks list shows the tasks for which there are no shortcuts on the desktop. To add a shortcut to the desktop, select the required tasks in the Available tasks list and click Add >>.
Configuring Your Control Panel 53 To remove a preset: 1 Go to Server > Interface Management > Desktop Presets tab. 2 Select the check box corresponding to the preset that you wish to remove and click Remove Selected. Confirm removal and click OK. Adjusting Session Idle Time You can adjust the allowed idle time for any session in Plesk as required. To adjust session security parameters: 1 Click Server shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click Session Settings in the Control Panel group.
CHAPTER 4 Configuring and Maintaining Your Server After you have installed Plesk software on your server and configured the control panel, you need to configure your system and set up all services required for its operation. To configure your Plesk managed server through the control panel, follow the instructions provided in this chapter. In this chapter: Adding and Removing IP Addresses ................................................................. 55 Configuring DNS Services .........................
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server 55 Adding and Removing IP Addresses After installation, Plesk reads all your IP addresses from the network configuration files and can then use these IP addresses for hosting DNS domains and Web sites. When you obtain a new IP address that you would like to use on the server, you should add the address through the control panel, as Plesk might not recognize manual modifications you make to the network configuration files.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server To add a new IP address to the server: 1 Go to Server > IP Addresses and click Add New IP Address. 2 Select the network interface for the new IP from the Interface dropdown box. All network cards installed on your server are shown in this drop-down box. 3 Enter the IP address and subnet mask in the corresponding box (e.g., 123.123.123.123/16). 4 Select the type of the new IP address, shared or exclusive, using the IP type radio button.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server To specify what web site will open when users refer to the web resource on your server by an IP address: 1 Go to Server > IP Addresses and click the respective number in the Hosting column. All sites hosted on this IP will be listed. 2 Select the site you need and click Set as Default. To change an IP address allocation type (shared, exclusive) or assign another SSL certificate to an IP address: 1 Go to Server > IP Addresses and click the IP address you need.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server Configuring DNS Services Your control panel works in cooperation with the BIND DNS server, which enables you to run DNS service on the same machine where you host Web sites.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server 59 4 Confirm removal and click OK. Plesk updates automatically the zone name, hostname, administrator‘s e-mail address, and serial number, and writes the default values for the rest of Start of Authority record parameters to the zone files it maintains. If you are not satisfied with the default values, you can change them through the control panel.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server If you are using third-party DNS servers, and are not running your own DNS server, you should switch off your control panel's DNS server: 1 Click the Server shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the DNS icon in the Services group. 3 Click the Switch off icon in the Tools group. To restore the original configuration of server-wide DNS template: 1 Click the Server shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the DNS icon in the Services group.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server 61 Configuring Plesk to Run Behind a Firewall If you are running Plesk behind a firewall, you might encounter certain problems with resolution of domain names served by Plesk: when you set up a new DNS domain in Plesk, its zone file includes a resource record that associates the domain name with the IP address your Plesk server is on, i.e. an internal network address like 192.168.1.1. As the 192.168.x.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server Configuring Mail Services Your control panel works in cooperation with Qmail mail server, which provides mail services for your domains. After installation the mail server is configured automatically and is ready to serve, however, we recommend that you review the default settings to make sure that they satisfy your needs: 1 Click the Server shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the Mail icon in the Services group.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server 63 Selecting the Use of short and full names is allowed option will allow users to log in to their mail accounts by specifying only the left part of e-mail address before the @ sign (for example, username), or by specifying the full e-mail address (for example, username@your-domain.com).
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server Setting Up Spam Protection To protect your users from spam, you can use the following tools with your control panel: SpamAssassin spam filter. It is a powerful spam filter that uses a wide variety of local and network tests to identify spam signatures.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server In this section: Setting Up SpamAssassin Spam Filter...............................................................66 Setting Up Spam Protection Based on DomainKeys ..........................................67 Switching On Spam Protection Based on DNS Blackhole Lists ..........................69 Setting Up Support for Sender Policy Framework System .................................69 Setting Up Server-wide Black and White Lists .......................................
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server Setting Up SpamAssassin Spam Filter To switch on SpamAssassin spam filter: 1 Click the Server shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the Spam Filter icon in the Services group. 3 To let your users set their own spam filtering preferen ces on a permailbox basis, select the Apply individual settings to spam filtering check box.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server 67 To add entries to the black list, click Add Addresses. If you have a list of entries stored in a file, click Browse to specify it, and then click OK. Otherwise, select the From List option, and type the e-mail addresses into the E-mail addresses box. Place each address in one row, or separate addresses with a coma, a colon, or a white space.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server Allow signing outgoing mail. Selecting this option allows you and your customers to switch on support for DomainKeys e-mail signing on a per-domain basis through the domain administration screens of the control panel (Domains > domain name > Mail > Preferences > Use DomainKeys spam protection system to sign outgoing e-mail messages option). It does not automatically switch on signing of outgoing e-mail messages. Verify incoming mail.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server 69 Switching On Spam Protection Based on DNS Blackhole Lists You can use free and paid subscription blackhole lists with your server. Visit http://spamlinks.net/filter-dnsbl-lists.htm and choose a DNSBL server you want to use. To switch on spam protection based on DNSBL: Click the Server shortcut in the navigation pane. Click the Mail icon in the Services group. Select the Switch on spam protection based on DNS blackhole lists check box.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server 4 To specify additional rules that are applied by the spam filter before the SPF check is actually done by the mail server, type the rules you need in the SPF local rules box. We recommend that you add a rule for checking messages against the open database of trusted senders, for example, 'include:spf.trusted-forwarder.org'. For more information on SPF rules, visit http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-schlittspf-classic-02.txt.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server 71 Configuring Antivirus To provide your e-mail users with anti-virus protection, you can use either the Dr. Web or Kaspersky Antivirus solutions. Both Dr. Web and Kaspersky Antivirus can scan server's mail traffic in real time, however, only Kaspersky Antivirus allows fine tuning and filtering of specific file types from attachments. The both programs require an additional license key with annual renewal.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server To set up anti-virus protection for a mailbox, proceed to the Protecting Mailboxes From Viruses section. If you installed Kaspersky Antivirus, for instruction on setting up and using antivirus, see the Kaspersky Antivirus Module Administrator's Guide at http://www.parallels.com/en/products/plesk/docs/.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server 73 Configuring Mailman Mailing List Software To provide your customers with capabilities to run their own mailing lists or newsletters, you should install the GNU Mailman package on your server (you could have done so during installation of Plesk), and set up the mailing list administrator's account— otherwise it will not work. To set up the mailing list administrator's account from your control panel: 1 Click the Server shortcut in the navigation pane.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server To use remote database servers with your hosting machine, you need to: 1 Set up a remote database server: 1. Install MySQL or PostgreSQL software. 2. Set up database administrator's account. 3. Enable network access to the database server. 2 Configure Plesk for working with your remote database server. In this section: Setting Up Remote Database Hosting ...............................................................75 Managing Database Servers ................
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server 75 Setting Up Remote Database Hosting If you are going to use a Plesk-managed server as a remote database server, you do not need to install MySQL software: Plesk comes with MySQL software, which is automatically installed during installation of Plesk. In this case, you only need to enable network access to this database server and then register it with Plesk.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server 4 Open the file /var/lib/pgsql/data/postgresql.conf with a text editor. If you are installing PostgreSQL version earlier than 8, add the line tcpip_socket = true to this file. If you are installing PostgreSQL version later than 8, add the line listen_addresses = '*'. 5 Open the file /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server 77 To set up database hosting preferences that will affect all databases created through Plesk: 1 Go to Server > Database Servers > Preferences. 2 To simplify maintenance of customers' databases, select the Add client's login name and underscore to beginning of database names check box. All names of newly created databases will look like client's login name_database name. This will allow you to locate databases related to a particular Plesk user.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server Managing Database Servers To manage a database server: 1 Click the Server shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the Database Servers icon in the Services group. 3 Click the icon corresponding to the database server you need. A web interface of a database management tool will open in a separate browser window. To change the MySQL database server administrator's password: 1 Login to the MySQL database server as root. 2 Login to MySQL as root.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server 79 To unregister a database server from Plesk: 1 Click the Server shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the Database Servers icon in the Services group. 3 Select the check box to the right of the database server‘s name. 4 Click Remove Selected. 5 Confirm the operation and click OK. To unregister from Plesk a database server that has databases or is assigned as default for hosting customers' databases: 1 Delete databases from the database server: 1.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server For instructions on managing databases, refer to the Deploying Databases (on page 147) section of this guide. Enabling Support for Adobe ColdFusion If you want to support ColdFusion scripts on the server, you should obtain a distribution package from Adobe and then install it on the server. Plesk Control Panel supports Adobe ColdFusion versions 6,7, and 8.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server 81 Enabling Integration with Sitebuilder Sitebuilder is a Web site creation and content management system developed by Parallels. It has proven to be highly popular with site administrators because it enables users without any technical skills and knowledge of markup languages to create professionally looking Web sites.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server Integration. Here you can review single sign-on settings for Parallels products installed on the server. For more information, see http://download1.parallels.com/SiteBuilder/4.0.0/doc/admin/en_US/html/viewing_siteb uilder_sso_settings.htm. Backup. Here you can back up data from the Sitebuilder system on demand. For more information, see http://download1.parallels.com/SiteBuilder/4.0.0/doc/admin/en_US/html/backing_up_a nd_restoring_sitebuilder_data.htm.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server 83 You can provide your customers with access to site creation and management services on a per user or per site basis: there are individual settings that you can adjust for a user account (Clients > client name > Preferences) and for a Web site (Domains > domain name > Setup).
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server Enabling Support for Miva E-commerce Applications To allow your customers use Miva e-commerce solutions, you need to install on the server the Miva Empresa package shipped with Plesk distribution (if you did not install it during installation of Plesk), and then enable support for Miva applications for the respective hosting accounts.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server To enable support for Miva applications for an individual hosting account: 1 Go to Domains > domain name > Setup. 2 Select the Miva support check box and click OK. To install Miva Fasttrack or Miva Merchant on a site, follow the instructions provided in the Installing Applications (on page 151) chapter.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server Configuring Statistics After installation, the control panel's statistical utility is set up to: Count the inbound and outbound traffic Count the disk space occupied by Web content, log files, databases, mailboxes, Web applications, mailing list archives, and backup files Keep the Web statistics and traffic statistics gathered by Webalizer or AWstats programs only for the last three months To review or adjust these settings: 1 Click the Server short
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server New comments are posted to the existing trouble tickets The closed trouble tickets are reopened because the customer has encountered the same problem again 87 To view or modify the notification system settings: 1 Go to Server > Notifications. 2 By selecting the check boxes in the Notifications table, specify the types of control panel users or external e-mail users who should receive notices on events.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server Domain (Web site) hosting account expiration Resource overage Help Desk events or user's first and last name IP address the domain is hosted on or domain name user name for authorization in the control panel or user's first and last name account expiration date or domain name user name f
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server the host name the contents of the ticket, or a comment posted 89
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server Configuring Help Desk Help Desk is a convenient way for your customers to reach you when they need your assistance. After you set it up and switch on, the Help Desk becomes accessible to all users who were granted access to control panel, including your resellers, domain owners, and email users. Additionally, you can allow submission of problem reports by e-mail. Your Help Desk shows all reports posted by your resellers and their customers.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server 91 Notification sender's name, and Notification sender's return address. Once a report has been retrieved by e-mail and posted to the Help Desk, the Help Desk sends a notice to the report sender. This allows the report sender to subsequently add comments to the report by replying to the message.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server To temporarily disallow your users to select a category when posting new reports, click its title in the Title column, clear the Switched on check box, and click OK. To delete a category, select the respective check box and click Remove Selected. To disallow customers to send reports to Help Desk by e-mail: 1 Go to Help Desk > Mail Gate Settings. 2 Click Switch off in the Tools group.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server Starting, Stopping and Restarting Services You can monitor, start, stop and restart various Plesk services from the control panel. To see the status of a service: 1 Select the Server shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click Service Management on the Server administration page.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server Enabling Piped Logs for Web Server to Reduce the Risk of Web Service Disruption If you are going to host more than 300 domains or Web sites on your server, you should switch on support for piped logs in the Apache Web server. To do this, follow these steps: 1 Log in to the server shell. 2 Issue the command mysql -uadmin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server 95 4 To find a message with specific subject, select the queue in the Queues drop-down box, type the desired combination of symbols into the Subject box, and click Search. The messages matching your search criteria will be listed at the bottom of the screen. To reset the filter, click Show All. 5 To find a message from a specific sender, click the Show Advanced link, type the sender‘s e-mail address into the Envelope Sender box, and click Search.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server Scheduling Tasks If you need to run scripts on your server at specific time, use the task scheduling facility on your server to make the system automatically run the scripts for you. Important: To prohibit control panel users from scheduling tasks on behalf of user "root", create on the server's file system an empty file with name root.crontab.lock in the location /plesk_installation_directory/var/.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server 97 To schedule the task to run every Nth period, enter the combination */N, where N is the legal value for this field (minute, hour, day, month). For example, */15 in the Minute field schedules the task to start every 15 minutes. You can type the contracted names of months and days of the week, which are the first three letters: Aug, Jul, Mon, Sat, etc. However, the contracted names cannot be separated with commas or used together with numbers.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server Extending Plesk Capabilities with Modules In this version of Plesk, you can extend the functionality of your control panel without upgrade. This can be done by installing additional functional components, available as modules developed by Parallels or third parties. The modules can be easily installed, removed, and configured directly from the control panel.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server 99 Installing Modules You can install a module to the Plesk server in two ways: from the control panel (recommended), and from the command line. To install modules from the control panel: 1 Login as administrator to the control panel. 2 Select the Modules shortcut in the navigation pane 3 Click Manage Modules. 4 Click Add new module. 5 Select a module package file, and click OK.
Configuring and Maintaining Your Server Some modules might require you to install a license key in order to be able to use them. You can check out the terms of usage on the module manufacturer‘s web site, or look them up in the control panel‘s Modules management screen: for each module installed there is a corresponding list entry accompanied by an icon, which shows whether license key is required.
CHAPTER 5 Serving Your Customers This chapter provides you with detailed instructions on setting up and managing user accounts, web sites, and e-mail accounts. In this chapter: Before You Start Serving Your Customers ........................................................ 102 Managing User Accounts .................................................................................. 118 Hosting Web Sites .............................................................................................
Serving Your Customers Before You Start Serving Your Customers This section explains the actions you are suggested to do before you start providing services to your your customers. In this section: Simplifying Setup of User Accounts ................................................................... 103 Simplifying Setup of Domains and Web Sites .................................................... 107 Prepackaging Applications Your Customers Can Use .......................................
Serving Your Customers 103 Simplifying Setup of User Accounts If you are going to serve numerous users, you may want to create account configuration presets, referred to as client templates, that will simplify setting up user accounts for new customers. The templates cover all resource usage allotments, permissions and limits that you can define for a user account. To create a client template: 1 Click the Clients shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the Client Templates icon in the Tools group.
Serving Your Customers Log rotation management. Specify whether the customer will be able to adjust the cleanup and recycling of processed log files for his or her sites. Anonymous FTP management. Specify whether the customer will be able to have an FTP directory where all users could download and upload files without the need to enter login and password. A web site should reside on a dedicated IP address in order to use anonymous FTP service. Task scheduling.
Serving Your Customers 105 Disk space. Specify the total amount of disk space in megabytes that is allocated to the customer. It includes disk space occupied by all files related to user's domains/web sites: web site contents, databases, applications, mailboxes, log files and backup files.
Serving Your Customers IP address allocation. Specify the shared IP addresses that you wish to allocate to the customer. If you wish to automatically provision dedicated IP addresses, select the Allocate exclusive IP addresses to client check box and specify the number of IP addresses that should be taken from your IP range and assigned to the customer. Creation of a user account in Sitebuilder.
Serving Your Customers 107 Simplifying Setup of Domains and Web Sites If you are going to serve numerous users with a great number of domains, you may want to create hosting configuration presets, referred to as domain templates, which will simplify setting up hosting accounts for new domains and web sites. The templates cover all resource usage allotments, permissions and limits that you can define for a hosting account, plus mail bounce and Web statistics retention settings.
Serving Your Customers g Maximum amount of traffic. Specify the amount of data in megabytes that can be transferred from the web site during a month. Once the limit is reached, the appropriate notices are sent to your and your client's e-mail addresses and the resource overage is indicated by a corresponding icon shown in the control panel to the left of the domain name (see the list of domain names by clicking the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane). h Maximum number of web users.
Serving Your Customers 109 specify when to recycle log files, specify how many instances of each log file processed by Plesk's statistical utilities to store on the server, specify whether they should be compressed, specify whether they should be sent to an e-mail address after processing. r Web and traffic statistics retention. Specify the number of months during which the Web and bandwidth usage statistics should be kept on the server. s DNS.
Serving Your Customers Support for programming and scripting languages widely used in development of dynamic Web sites and server-side Web applications.
Serving Your Customers 111 To reflect the changes in your domain templates that will apply to the newly created accounts: 1 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the Domain Templates icon in the Tools group. 3 Click the template name corresponding to the domain template you wish to update. 4 Modify the settings as required and click OK. Note that modifying templates does not affect the existing domains and web sites.
Serving Your Customers AnyInventory Inventory management program. http://anyinventory.sourceforge.n et/ AutoIndex Web site directory indexing system. http://autoindex.sourceforge.net b2evolution Blog. http://b2evolution.net bbclone Counter. http://www.bbclone.de Brim Personal online organizer. http://www.brim-project.org/ Coppermine Photogallery. http://coppermine.sourceforge.n et CSLH Customer support. http://www.proxy2.de Docbase Knowledge base management system.
Serving Your Customers MyOrgBook Online organizer. http://www.myorgbook.com Noah's Classifieds Classifieds system. http://classifieds.phpoutsourcing. com/ openbiblio Library. http://obiblio.sourceforge.net osCommerce E-commerce system. http://www.oscommerce.com Owl Knowledge base and documentation storage system. http://owl.sourceforge.net phpAdsNew (Openads) Banner rotation management and tracking system for gathering statistics. http://phpadsnew.com phpBB Forum. http://www.phpbb.
Serving Your Customers PPWSE Plesk Professional Web Site http://www.parallels.com/en/prod Editor is a content management ucts/plesk75reloaded/addons/pp system developed by Parallels. It wse/ is a predecessor of Parallels Plesk Sitebuilder. Serendipity Content management system and http://www.s9y.org/ blogging. Sitebar Bookmark server. http://sourceforge.net/projects/sit ebar Siteframe Content management system. http://siteframe.org/ SMF Online forum. http://www.simplemachines.
Serving Your Customers 115 All application packages stored in the vault are listed in the Site Application Packages group. There are two icons next to the application name. The left icon denotes the following: - the application is shown in the list of applications available for installation. - the application is hidden from the list of applications available for installation.
Serving Your Customers 5 Select the application version to which you want to upgrade, read the terms of the license agreement, and then click Upgrade. 6 Repeat the steps 3 to 6 for every domain/Web site hosted on your server, or inform your customers (site owners) who use this application that they can upgrade this application to the new version. To do so, they will need to click the Web Applications icon on their home pages in Plesk, and then click a corresponding shortcut in the U column.
Serving Your Customers To revert back to the original structure of web server directories and files: 1 Select the Server shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the Skeleton icon in the Services group. 3 Click the Default button.
CHAPTER 6 Managing User Accounts Plesk users hierarchy is limited to three user levels: client accounts, domain administrator accounts, and e-mail user accounts. All these types of users can have access to control panel for managing their own web sites and e-mail accounts. For users who need to resell hosting services or host numerous domains/web sites, you should create client accounts. And then, your resellers can create domain administrator accounts for their own customers.
Serving Your Customers 119 Adding User Accounts This chapter focuses on client level accounts that you will create for your customers or resellers. If you need to create a domain administrator's account for your reseller's customer, assign permissions and allocate resources, see the Setting Up Hosting Account for a Web Site (on page 131) section. If you need to create an e-mail user account, see the Creating Mailboxes section.
Serving Your Customers Maximum number of domain aliases. Specify the total number of additional alternative domain names that the customer will be able to use for his or her web sites. Disk space. Specify the total amount of disk space in megabytes that is allocated to the customer. It includes disk space occupied by all files related to user's domains/web sites: web site contents, databases, applications, mailboxes, log files and backup files.
Serving Your Customers 121 Validity period. Specify the term for a hosting account. At the end of the term, all customer's domains/web sites will be suspended, its Web, FTP and mail services will no longer be accessible to the Internet users, and the reseller and his or her customers (domain owners) will not be able to log in to the control panel.
Serving Your Customers Anonymous FTP management. Specify whether the customer will be able to have an FTP directory where all users could download and upload files without the need to enter login and password. A web site should reside on a dedicated IP address in order to use anonymous FTP service. Task scheduling. Specify whether the customer will be able to schedule tasks in the system. Scheduled tasks can be used for running scripts or utilities on schedule. Domain limits adjustment.
Serving Your Customers 123 Modifying User Accounts To add or remove an IP address from a customer's IP pool: 1 Click the Clients shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the client name you need. 3 Click IP pool. To allocate an IP address, click Add New IP Address, select the address or addresses (to select multiple IP addresses, press and hold the Control button on the keyboard and left-click the required addresses) in the Vacant IPs box and click OK.
Serving Your Customers 4 Specify the required permissions and click OK. To allocate more resources to the customer: 1 Click the Clients shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the client name you need. 3 Click the Limits icon in the Tools group. 4 Specify the resource allotments and click OK. To change user's control panel interface language and skin: 1 Click the Clients shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the client name you need. 3 Click the Preferences icon in the Tools group.
Serving Your Customers 125 Modifying Accounts for Your Resellers' Customers (Domain Administrators) To allow your reseller's customer access the control panel: Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. Click the domain name you need. Click the Domain Administrator icon in the Domain group.
Serving Your Customers To allocate more resources to the site owner: 1 2 3 4 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. Click the domain name you need. Click the Limits icon in the Domain group. Specify the resource allotments and click OK. To change user's control panel interface language and skin: 1 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the domain name you need. 3 Click the Domain Administrator icon in the Domain group.
Serving Your Customers 127 Introducing Similar Changes to Numerous Hosting Accounts To change hosting options for a number of hosting accounts at once: 1 Select the required hosting accounts. Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane and select the check boxes corresponding to the required domains, if you want to change several domain administrator accounts at once.
Serving Your Customers Suspending and Unsuspending User Accounts To suspend a user account and user's sites: 1 Go to Clients and click the client name you need. 2 Click Switch off in the Tools group. Access to control panel will be blocked for the user and his or her customers (site owners). User's domains/web sites will be suspended, their Web, FTP and mail services will no longer be accessible to the Internet users.
Serving Your Customers 129 Removing User Accounts To remove a user account with user's Web sites: 1 Click the Clients shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Select a check box corresponding to the user account you want to remove and click Remove Selected. 3 Confirm removal and click OK. The user account with all user's sites will be removed from the server. To remove a site owner's account from the server: 1 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane.
Serving Your Customers Obtaining Domain Names Before you publish a site on the Internet, you must register your unique domain name with a domain name registration authority. A domain name is an easy-to-remember web site address. When you want to visit a web site, you enter a domain name (e.g. your-domain.com) or a Uniform Resource Locator (e.g. http://www.your-domain.com) into your browser's address bar.
Serving Your Customers 131 Setting Up Hosting Account for a Web Site To host a Web site on the server: 1 2 3 4 Click the Clients shortcut in the navigation pane. Click the required client in the list. Click Add New Domain. Specify the domain name just as you have registered it. Leave the www check box selected if you wish to allow users to access the site by a common and habitual URL like www.your-domain.com.
Serving Your Customers SSL support. Secure Sockets Layer encryption is generally used for protecting transfer of sensitive data during online transactions on e-commerce Web sites that run on dedicated IP addresses. SSL certificates that participate in the encryption process are usually applied to a single domain name on a single IP address, therefore, each site that needs SSL protection must be hosted on a dedicated IP address.
Serving Your Customers 133 Support for programming and scripting languages widely used in development of dynamic Web sites and server-side Web applications.
Serving Your Customers If you need to host several domains on your machine that will point to a site hosted on another server, you should set up domain forwarding. Refer to chapter Serving Domain Names for Sites Hosted on Other Servers (Domain Forwarding) for details. In this section: Limiting the Amount of Resources a Site Can Consume ................................... 135 Allowing the Site Owner to Log in to Control Panel............................................
Serving Your Customers 135 Limiting the Amount of Resources a Site Can Consume By default, new web sites that you set up without the help of domain templates, are allowed to consume unlimited amounts of bandwidth (data transfer) and disk space. To limit the amount of resources this site can consume: 1 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the domain name you need. 3 Click the Limits icon. 4 Adjust the resource usage allotments as required: Maximum number of subdomains.
Serving Your Customers Maximum number of web users. Specify the number of personal web pages that the domain owner can host for other users under his or her domain. This service is mostly used in educational institutions that host non-commercial personal pages of their students and staff. These pages usually have web addresses like http://your-domain.com/~username. If you wish to allow execution of scripts embedded in personal web pages, select the Allow the web users scripting check box.
Serving Your Customers 137 5 Select the Switch on connections limiting check box, and in the Connections limited to box, type the maximum number of simultaneous connections. For example: 100. 6 Click OK.
Serving Your Customers Allowing the Site Owner to Log in to Control Panel To allow the site owner to log in to control panel for managing his or her web site: 1 2 3 4 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. Click the required domain name in the list. Click the Domain Administrator icon in the Domain group. Select the Allow domain administrator's access check box. 5 Type the password for access to the site owner's control panel.
Serving Your Customers 139 DNS zone management. Allow or disallow the site owner to manage the DNS zone of his or her domain. This is recommended only for experienced users. Java applications management. Allow or disallow the site owner to install Java applications and applets on the web site. Mailing lists management. Allow or disallow the site owner to use mailing lists provided by the GNU Mailman software. Spam filter management.
Serving Your Customers Creating and Publishing a Site If you installed Sitebuilder and a license key for it on the server, you can create and publish Web sites using Sitebuilder.
Serving Your Customers 141 Publishing Sites Through FTP 1 Connect to the server with an FTP client program, using FTP account credentials that you specified during setup of hosting account or obtained from your provider. Enable the passive mode if you are behind a firewall. 2 Upload files and directories that should be accessible through HTTP protocol to the httpdocs directory, and files/directories that should be transferred securely over SSL protocol to the httpsdocs directory.
Serving Your Customers Publishing Sites Through Plesk File Manager To upload files through Plesk File Manager: 1 2 3 4 Log in to Click the Click the Click the Plesk control panel. Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. required domain name in the list. File Manager icon in the Hosting group. 5 Create and upload files and directories.
Serving Your Customers 143 To copy or move a file or directory to another location, select the required file or directory using the appropriate check box, and click Copy/Move. Specify the destination for the file or directory to be copied or renamed to, then click Copy to copy, or Move to move it. To update the file or directory creation date, click updated with the current local time. Touch. The time stamp will be To remove a file or directory, select the corresponding check box, and click Selected.
Serving Your Customers In this section: Publishing from Microsoft FrontPage through FTP ............................................ 144 Publishing from Microsoft FrontPage through HTTP.......................................... 145 Publishing from Microsoft FrontPage through FTP To publish files through FTP: 1 Open your FrontPage program. 2 Open a FrontPage Web site: open File menu and select the Open Site item.
Serving Your Customers 145 Publishing from Microsoft FrontPage through HTTP To publish files through HTTP on a server that supports FrontPage Server Extensions: 1 Open your FrontPage program. 2 Open a FrontPage Web site: open File menu and select the Open Site item. 3 Go to Remote Web site view: click the Web Site tab, and then the Remote Web Site button at the bottom of the window. 4 Click the Remote Web Site Properties button in the upper-right corner of the window.
Serving Your Customers Publishing Sites with Adobe Dreamweaver Before publishing a site from Dreamweaver, you need to define the site properties, that is, you need to tell Dreamweaver where your site files are located on your computer, and to specify the server to which you want to publish the site. To define a site in Dreamweaver: 1 From the Site menu, choose New Site. The Site Definition screen opens. 2 Click the Advanced tab. 3 In the Local Info category, specify the following: Site name.
Serving Your Customers 147 Previewing a Site Once you published a site on the server, you may want to make sure that it functions properly in the actual hosting environment. You can preview the site through your favorite Web browser, even if the information on the domain name has not yet propagated in the Domain Name System. Note that Adobe Flash and CGI scripts will not work during preview.
Serving Your Customers Creating or Importing a Database To create a new database on a hosting account: 1 2 3 4 Click Click Click Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. the required domain name in the list. Databases. Add New Database. 5 Enter a name for the database. We recommend that you choose a name that starts with a Latin alphabet symbol and comprises only alphanumeric and underscore symbols (up to 64 symbols).
Serving Your Customers 149 To manage your databases and their contents, use your favorite MySQL or PostgreSQL client or the web based database management tool accessible from Plesk control panel (Domains > domain name > Databases > Database name > DB WebAdmin). Creating Database User Accounts If you collaborate with other people on managing a web site and wish to give them access to the database, you should create separate user accounts for them.
Serving Your Customers Removing Databases To remove a database with its contents: 1 2 3 4 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. Click the required domain name in the list. Click Databases in the Services group. Select a check box corresponding to the database that you wish to remove. If the required check box appears grayed out, this means that this database is used by a site application and you can remove it only by uninstalling the respective application. 5 Click Remove Selected.
Serving Your Customers 151 Installing Applications To enhance a web site with valuable features, such as guest books, forums, hit counters, photo galleries, and e-commerce solutions, you can install the respective applications from Plesk web application library (Domains > domain name > Web Applications). To install an application on your site: 1 Go to Domains > domain name > Web Applications and click Install New Application.
Serving Your Customers If you want a certain Web application to be started when someone tries to enter a domain, it can be done by creating a default domain application. To set an application as default for a domain: 1 Go to Domains > domain name > Web Applications. 2 Select a check box corresponding to Web Application you want to set as default and click Default. Click OK to confirm. Now, when a user enters an URL in the address field of his browser (for example, http://example.
Serving Your Customers 153 Installing Java Web Applications You can install Java Web application packages in the Web archive format (WAR). These Java applications are not distributed with Plesk, therefore you should obtain them separately. To install a Java Web application: 1 Go to Domains > domain name > Web Applications > Java Applications tab and click Switch On. This will start the Tomcat service, which provides an environment for Java code to run in cooperation with a web server.
Serving Your Customers To install on your site an application written in Ruby: 1 Go to Domains > Domain name > Setup. 2 Select the CGI and FastCGI check boxes, and click OK. 3 Connect to your FTP account, change to the /htdocs directory, and create a subdirectory where the application files will reside. Let's call this directory your_application, for illustration purposes. 4 Upload the application files to the htdocs/your_application directory. 5 Create a file with name .
Serving Your Customers Your Plesk control panel provides facilities for purchasing SSL certificates from GeoTrust, Inc. and GoDaddy. In this section: Obtaining and Installing SSL Certificates from GeoTrust, Inc. or GoDaddy ....... 156 Obtaining and Installing SSL Certificates from Other Certification Authorities.... 158 Creating and Installing Free Self-signed SSL Certificate ................................... 159 Uninstalling a Certificate from Your Site .................................................
Serving Your Customers Obtaining and Installing SSL Certificates from GeoTrust, Inc. or GoDaddy To purchase an SSL certificate through MyPleskCom online store and secure a site: 1 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the required domain name in the list. 3 Click Certificates in the Services group. A list of SSL certificates that you have in your repository will be displayed. 4 Click Add New Certificate. 5 Specify the certificate properties: Certificate name.
Serving Your Customers 157 16 Return to the domain's administration screen (Domains > domain name) and click Setup in the Hosting group. 17 Select the SSL certificate that you wish to install from the Certificate drop-down box. If there is no Certificate drop-down box on the screen, this means that you are on a shared hosting account; therefore, you need to upgrade your hosting package and purchase a dedicated IP address from your hosting provider. 18 Select the SSL support check box and click OK.
Serving Your Customers Obtaining and Installing SSL Certificates from Other Certification Authorities To secure a site with an SSL certificate from other certificate authorities: 1 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the required domain name in the list. 3 Click Certificates in the Services group. A list of SSL certificates that you have in your repository will be displayed. 4 Click Add New Certificate. 5 Specify the certificate properties: Certificate name.
Serving Your Customers 159 15 Select the SSL certificate that you wish to install from the Certificate drop-down box. If there is no Certificate drop-down box on the screen, this means that you are on a shared hosting account; therefore, you need to upgrade your hosting package and purchase a dedicated IP address from your provider. 16 Select the SSL support check box and click OK.
Serving Your Customers Uninstalling a Certificate from Your Site To uninstall a certificate from your site and disable SSL protection: 1 Make sure that the certificate you want to remove is not used at the moment. 2 Go to Domains > domain name > Setup. The Certificate drop-down box indicates which SSL certificate is currently used. 3 If the certificate that you want to remove is currently in use, you should first release it: in the Certificate drop-down box, select another certificate and click OK.
Serving Your Customers 161 Protecting a Resource To password protect a directory in your site and to specify authorized users: 1 2 3 4 Click Click Click Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. the required domain name in the list. the Directories icon in the Hosting group. Add New Directory. 5 Specify the path to the directory that you wish to password protect. This can be any directory existing in the site, for example: /private.
Serving Your Customers Specifying Authorized Users To add an authorized user of a protected directory: 1 2 3 4 5 Click Click Click Click Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. the required domain name in the list. the Directories icon in the Hosting group. on the name of the directory you need. the Add New User icon. 6 Specify the login name and password that will be used for accessing the protected area. The password should be from 5 to 14 symbols in length. 7 Click OK.
Serving Your Customers 163 Unprotecting a Resource To remove password protection and make the resource available to the public: 1 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the required domain name in the list. 3 Click the Directories icon in the Hosting group. A list of password protected directories will open. 4 Select a check box corresponding to the name of the directory, from which you want to remove protection. 5 Click Remove Selected.
Serving Your Customers Setting up Subdomains To set up a subdomain: 1 2 3 4 Click Click Click Click the the the the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. required domain name in the list. Subdomains icon. Add New Subdomain icon. 5 Type the subdomain name as desired. This can be, for example, a topic of a site, organization department, or any other combination of letters, numbers and hyphens (up to 63 characters in length). The subdomain name must begin with an alphabet character.
Serving Your Customers 165 To publish web content to the subdomain‘s web space, follow the instruction presented in the Publishing a Site (on page 140) section. Removing Subdomains To remove a subdomain with its web content: 1 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the required domain name in the list. 3 Click Subdomains. 4 Select a check box corresponding to the subdomain name that you wish to remove, and click Remove Selected. 5 Confirm removal and click OK.
Serving Your Customers Setting Up Domain Aliases To set up a domain alias: 1 2 3 4 Click Click Click Click the the the the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. required domain name in the list. Domain Aliases icon. Add Domain Alias icon. 5 Type the desired domain alias name, for example alias.com. Domain aliases can comprise letters, digits and hyphens. Each part of the domain alias between dots should not be longer than 63 symbols.
Serving Your Customers 167 Modifying Properties of Domain Aliases To change the properties of an alias: 1 2 3 4 5 Click Click Click Click Click the the the the the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. required domain name in the list. Domain Aliases icon. alias name you need. Preferences icon in the Tools group. To modify resource records in the DNS zone of a domain alias: 1 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the required domain name in the list. 3 Click Domain Aliases.
Serving Your Customers Hosting Personal Web Pages on Your Web Server You can host on your Web server personal Web pages for individuals who do not need their own domain names. This service is popular with educational institutions that host non-commercial personal pages of their students and staff. These pages usually have Web addresses like http://your-domain.com/~username.
Serving Your Customers Changing FTP Password for a Web Page Owner To change FTP password for a web page owner: 1 Go to Domains > domain name > Web Users > web user name. 2 Type the new password into the New password and Confirm password boxes and click OK. Allocating More Disk Space to the Web Page Owner To allocate more disk space to the web page owner: 1 Go to Domains > domain name > Web Users, then click the required web user name.
Serving Your Customers Setting Up Anonymous FTP Access to the Server If you host a site on a dedicated IP address, you can set up a directory within the site, where other users will be able to anonymously download or upload files through FTP. Once anonymous FTP is enabled, the users will be able to log in to the ftp://ftp.yourdomain.com with the "anonymous" login name and any password. To allow anonymous FTP access: 1 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane.
Serving Your Customers 4 Adjust the settings as required and click OK. To switch off the anonymous FTP service, click the Switch off icon in the Tools group.
Serving Your Customers Customizing Web Server Error Messages When visitors coming to a site request pages that the web server cannot find, the web server generates and displays a standard HTML page with an error message. The standard error messages may inform of problems, but they do not usually say how to resolve them or how to get the lost visitor on his way, and they also look dull. You may want to create your own error pages and use them on your web server.
Serving Your Customers 173 To configure Plesk’s web server to show custom error pages for a domain: 1 Switch on support for custom error documents through Plesk. 1. Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. 2. Click the required domain name in the list. 3. Click Setup. 4. Select the Custom Error Documents check box. 5. Click OK. 2 If you access Plesk remotely, connect to your FTP account on the Plesk server, and go to the error_docs directory.
Serving Your Customers Customizing DNS Zone Configuration for Domains For each new domain name, your control panel automatically creates DNS zone in accordance with the configuration preset you define. The domain names should work fine with the automatic configuration, however if you need to perform custom modifications in the domain name zone, you can do that through your control panel. In this section: Viewing Resource Records ........................................................................
Serving Your Customers 175 Adding Resource Records To add a new resource record to the zone: 1 2 3 4 Click Click Click Click the the the the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. required domain name in the list. DNS icon in the Services group. Add New Record icon in the Tools group. 5 Select a resource record type, and specify the appropriate data: For an A record you will need to enter the domain name for which you wish to create an A record.
Serving Your Customers Modifying Resource Records To modify the properties of a resource record: Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. Click the domain name you need. Click the DNS icon. Click the hyperlink in the Host column corresponding to the resource record you want to modify. 5 Modify the record as required and click OK. 1 2 3 4 To modify the entries in the Start of Authority (SOA) record for a domain: 1 2 3 4 5 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane.
Serving Your Customers Removing Resource Records To remove a resource record from the zone: 1 2 3 4 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. Click the required domain name in the list. Click DNS Settings in the Services group. Select a check box corresponding to the record you wish to remove. 5 Click Remove Selected. 6 Confirm removal and click OK.
Serving Your Customers Serving Sites with External Domain Name Servers If you host web sites on this server and have a standalone DNS server acting as a primary (master) name server for your sites, you may want to set up your control panel's DNS server to function as a secondary (slave) name server. To make the control panel's DNS server act as a secondary name server: 1 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 3 4 5 6 7 Click the required domain name in the list.
Serving Your Customers 179 4 Add to the list the entries pointing to the appropriate name servers that are authoritative for the zone: click Add, specify a name server, and click OK. Repeat this for each name server you would like to test. The records will appear in the list. 5 Click on the records that you have just created. Plesk will retrieve the zone file from a remote name server and check the resource records to make sure that domain‘s resources are properly resolved.
Serving Your Customers Serving Domain Names for Sites Hosted on Other Servers (Domain Forwarding) If you need to serve a domain name or several domain names that point to a web site hosted on another server: 1 Click the Clients shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click Add New Domain. 3 Specify the domain name. Leave the www check box selected if you wish to allow users to access the site by a common and habitual URL like www.your-domain.com.
Serving Your Customers 181 Transferring Domains Between User Accounts To transfer a domain or several domains from one user account to another: 1 Select the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. Alternatively, you can select the Clients shortcut in the navigation pane and click on the required client name. 2 Select the check boxes corresponding to the domains you wish to transfer and click Change Owner. 3 Select the destination account you want to transfer selected domains to and click Next >>.
Serving Your Customers Removing Domains To delete a domain with its content: 1 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Select a check box corresponding to the domain name you wish to remove. 3 Click Remove Selected, confirm removal and click OK. To delete a subdomain with its Web content: 1 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the domain name you need. 3 Click the Subdomains icon in the Hosting group.
CHAPTER 7 Using E-mail Services You can use a number of different e-mail services with a single e-mail account. For example, you can have an e-mail address that will accept mail as any standard mailbox, forward to a number of recipients, and send an automatic response to the original message sender. If you are going to serve mailboxes under a specific domain with an external mail server, follow these steps: 1 Go to Domains > domain name > DNS Settings.
Serving Your Customers Creating Mailboxes If you wish to have an e-mail address associated with a site, like yourname@domain.com, you should create a mailbox. To do this: To create a mailbox: 1 Go to Domains > domain name > Mail and click Add New Mail Account. 2 Your domain name is shown to the right of @ sign, so you only need to specify the desired name for the mailbox.
Serving Your Customers 185 Setting Up Your E-mail Program for Retrieving Mail from Your Mailbox To set up Microsoft Outlook Express: 1 2 3 4 Open Microsoft Outlook Express. Go to Tools > Accounts. Click the Mail tab to open a list of your mail accounts. Click the Add > button and select the Mail … item. 5 Enter your name as you want it to appear in any messages you send, and click Next >. 6 Type your e-mail address that you created through Plesk (for example, your.name@your-domain.
Serving Your Customers 10 Enter the name by which you would like to refer to this account (for example, Work Account) and click Next >. 11 Verify that the information you entered is correct, and click Finish. 12 Click OK to close the Account Settings wizard. Accessing Your Mail from a Web Browser You can read your mail and compose new messages even if you are far from your home or office computer.
Serving Your Customers 187 Protecting Mailboxes from Spam To protect your mailbox from undesirable correspondence, do not publish your e-mail address on Internet forums and switch on the server-side spam filter provided by the SpamAssassin software. When you need to publish your e-mail address, create a disposable e-mail address - email alias - for your primary e-mail address, and publish it instead. All messages sent to the e-mail alias will come into your mailbox.
Serving Your Customers Setting Up Spam Filter If you receive undesirable correspondence to an e-mail address that you cannot or do not want to remove, consider setting up spam filter for your mailbox. To do this, Enable SpamAssassin spam filter on the Plesk server, if you installed the SpamAssassin component on the server, and Install spam filtering software of your choice to work with e-mail program on your home or office computer. In this section: Switching on Spam Filter ...................
Serving Your Customers 189 Switching on Spam Filter To switch on spam filtering for a mailbox: 1 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the required domain name in the list. 3 Click the Mail icon in the Services group. 4 Click the e-mail address you need. 5 Click the Spam Filter icon in the Tools group. 6 Configure the following settings as desired: The score required before a mail is considered spam. This setting adjusts spam filter sensitivity.
Serving Your Customers To add entries to the black list, click Add Addresses. If you have a list of entries stored in a file, click Browse to specify it, and then click OK. Otherwise, select the From List option, and type the e-mail addresses into the E-mail addresses box. Place each address in one row, or separate addresses with a coma, a colon, or a white space. You can use an asterisk (*) as a substitute for a number of letters, and question mark (?) as a substitute for a single letter.
Serving Your Customers 191 Improving Accuracy of Spam Detection You can improve accuracy of spam detection by training the spam filter on the e-mail messages that you have in your mailbox. To improve accuracy of spam detection: 1 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the required domain name in the list. 3 Click the Mail icon in the Services group. 4 Click the e-mail address you need. 5 Click the Spam Filter icon in the Tools group. 6 Click the Training tab.
Serving Your Customers Clearing Spam Filter's Database If you have accidentally made your spam filter learn a great number of spam e-mails as non-spam or vice versa, your spam filter will likely produce incorrect results. In this case, clear the spam filter's database and then repeat training. To clear spam filter’s database: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Click Click Click Click Click Click Click the the the the the the the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. required domain name in the list.
Serving Your Customers 193 Switching on Anti-virus Protection To switch on anti-virus protection for a mailbox: 1 2 3 4 5 Click Click Click Click Click the the the the the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. required domain name in the list. Mail icon. e-mail address you need. Antivirus icon in the Tools group. 6 Choose the desired mail scanning mode. You can switch on scanning for incoming mail, outgoing mail, or both.
Serving Your Customers Suspending and Unsuspending Mailboxes To temporarily suspend e-mail services for a mailbox: 1 2 3 4 5 Click Click Click Click Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. the required domain name in the list. Mail. the e-mail address, whose e-mail services you wish to suspend. Mailbox in the Tools group. 6 Clear the Mailbox check box. 7 Click OK. To resume e-mail services for a suspended mailbox: 1 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane.
Serving Your Customers 195 Removing Mailboxes To remove a mailbox: 1 2 3 4 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. Click the required domain name in the list. Click Mail. Select a check box corresponding to the mailbox that you wish to remove. 5 Click Remove Selected. 6 When prompted, confirm removal and click OK.
Serving Your Customers Setting Up Mail Forwarding to a Single E-mail Address To set up an e-mail address that will accept mail and forward it to another e-mail address: 1 2 3 4 5 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. Click the required domain name in the list. Click Mail in the Services group. Click Add New Mail Account. Specify the desired name for the mail forwarder next to Mail account name. The domain name is shown to the right of @ sign, so you only need to type the name.
Serving Your Customers Click OK. Click Redirect in the Tools group. Select the Redirect check box. Type the destination e-mail address to which you would like to forward e-mail. 12 Click OK. 8 9 10 11 In this section: Suspending and Unsuspending Mail Forwarders .............................................. 197 Suspending and Unsuspending Mail Forwarders To suspend a mail forwarder: 1 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the required domain name in the list. 3 Click Mail.
Serving Your Customers Setting Up Mail Forwarding to Multiple E-mail Addresses To set up an e-mail address that will accept mail and forward it to multiple other e-mail addresses: 1 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the required domain name in the list. 3 Click Mail in the Services group. 4 Click the required e-mail address. 5 Click Mail Group. 6 Click Add New Member. You should add at least one e-mail address before enabling mail forwarding to several e-mail addresses.
Serving Your Customers 199 Adding and Removing Recipient Addresses To add an external e-mail address to the list of mail accounts that receive forwarded email correspondence: 1 Go to Domains > domain name > Mail > mail account > Mail Group, then click Add New Member. 2 Enter the desired external e-mail address into the E-mail input field and click OK.
Serving Your Customers 6 Click Switch Off. Removing Mail Forwarders To remove a mail forwarder: 1 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the required domain name in the list. 3 Click Mail. 4 Select a check box corresponding to the mail forwarder that you wish to remove. 5 Click Remove Selected. 6 When prompted, confirm removal and click OK.
Serving Your Customers 201 Setting Up Automatic Reply If you are going on vacation and will not be able to check your mail for a while, you may want to leave a vacation notice that will be automatically sent to your correspondents once they send e-mail to your address. This is done with automatic reply facility, also referred to as autoresponder.
Serving Your Customers 5. As your correspondents may not figure out that the message they received from you was an automatic response, they may want to respond to your auto-reply. So, you should specify your e-mail address as the Return address, otherwise, their messages will be directed at the autoresponder‘s address. 6. Specify the automatic reply message format (plain text or HTML) and character encoding (UTF-8 is recommended).
Serving Your Customers 203 Switching off Automatic Reply To switch off an automatic reply for a mailbox: Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. Click the required domain name in the list. Click Mail. Click the e-mail address, for which you wish to switch off the automatic reply. 5 Click Autoresponders in the Tools group. 6 Click Switch off. 1 2 3 4 The automatic reply is now switched off.
Serving Your Customers Setting Up Site-Wide Preferences for Handling Mail to Nonexistent Users (Mail Bounce) When somebody sends an e-mail message to an e-mail address that does not exist under your domain, the mail server, by default accepts mail, processes it, and when it finds out that there is no such a recipient under the domain, it returns the mail back to sender with the ―this address no longer accepts mail‖ notice.
Serving Your Customers 205 Introducing Similar Changes to a Number of Mail Accounts at Once To save time and effort, you can change the settings of multiple mail accounts at once. This feature is called group operations. To perform group operations on multiple mail accounts: 1 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the required domain name in the list. 3 Click Mail in the Services group. 4 Select the check boxes corresponding to the mail accounts whose settings you want to change.
CHAPTER 8 Sending E-mail Notices to Multiple Customers at Once When you need to inform your customers of scheduled server maintenance, or to introduce new service offerings, you can use the Mass E-mail function (Server > Mass Email Messages) to send notices to all of your customers at once. You may want to create message templates and use them when needed, or you can send messages without using any templates.
Serving Your Customers 207 Creating, Editing and Removing Message Templates To create a new message template: 1 Go to Server > Mass E-Mail Messages and click Add Mass E-Mail Template. 2 Specify template name in the Template name field. 3 Specify sender's name and e-mail address in the From field. You can specify name, e-mail address or both. To specify both name and e-mail address, use the following format: Name . For example: John Doe .
Serving Your Customers To edit a message template: 1 Go to Server > Mass E-Mail Messages and click the required template in the list. 2 Specify template name in the Template name field. 3 Specify sender name and e-mail address in the From field. You can specify name, e-mail address or both. To specify both name and e-mail address, use the following format: Name . For example: John Doe .
Serving Your Customers 209 To remove a message template: 1 Go to Server > Mass E-Mail Messages. 2 Select the check box corresponding to the mass e-mail message template you want to remove and click Remove Selected. Confirm the removal and click OK.
Serving Your Customers Sending E-mail Notices To send an e-mail message to multiple customers at once: 1 Click Server in the navigation pane, then click Mass E-Mail Messages. 2 If you want to use a message template that you previously created (as described in the Creating, Editing and Removing Message Templates (on page 207) section), click the respective icon in the Create message column. If you want to send a custom message, click Send Mass E-Mail.
Serving Your Customers 211 7 If you want to save this message (both the text itself and information about its recipients) as a template for further use, select the check box to the left of Save text to a new template named field and specify the template name in this field. 8 Click Send to send the message. If you have chosen to save the message contents as a template, a template will be created and placed in the list of available templates.
Serving Your Customers Setting Up a Mailing List To set up a mailing list: Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. Click the required domain name in the list. Click the Mail icon in the Services group. Click the Mailing lists tab. Click the Switch On icon in the Tools group to start up the Mailman software on the server. 6 Click the Add New Mailing List icon in the Tools group. 7 Specify the desired name for the mailing list.
Serving Your Customers 213 Alternately, you can access the mailing list configuration the following way: 1 In your web browser, enter the following URL: http://lists./mailman/admin/ (where is your domain name, and is the name of the mailing list (i.e. the left part of the mailing list‘s e-mail address before the @ sign). A login screen opens. 2 Type the list administrator‘s password and click Let me in ….
Serving Your Customers Posting to Your Mailing List To post a newsletter issue or other information to the mailing list, send it by e-mail to the mailing list‘s e-mail address. All subscribed users will receive it. Removing Mailing Lists To remove a mailing list from site: 1 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 3 4 5 Click the required domain name in the list. Click Mail. Click the Mailing lists tab. Select a check box corresponding to the mailbox that you wish to remove.
CHAPTER 9 Using Help Desk for Resolving Your Customers' Issues If you decided to use the help desk integrated with the control panel and configured it as described in the Configuring Help Desk (on page 90) section, then you can use it to receive problem reports or requests for assistance from your customers and notify them when their issues are resolved. In this chapter: Viewing Trouble Tickets in Your Help Desk .......................................................
Serving Your Customers Viewing Trouble Tickets in Your Help Desk To view the problem reports you have in the Help Desk: 1 Click the Help Desk shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 If you need to view the problem reports submitted by users of this server, go to step 4.
Serving Your Customers 217 Commenting and Closing Trouble Tickets To close a ticket when the issue was resolved or to post your comment: 1 Click the Help Desk shortcut in the navigation pane. If you need to visit Help Desk on another server you manage, in the Global Help Desk group, click Servers, then select the server you need. 2 Locate the ticket you need and click its subject or identification number.
Serving Your Customers Migrating User Accounts, Domain Names and Web Sites from Other Hosting Platforms Migration of user accounts, domain names and web sites from other hosting platforms to Plesk control panel is performed by Plesk Migration Manager tool, created for easy and fast migration from other, competitive control panels to Plesk, and also for migration from older releases of Plesk and from different platforms of Plesk.
Serving Your Customers 219 7 Select the Dump all option in the Migration mode group. 8 If the Migration Manager detected the hosting platform incorrectly, select the platform from the Source platform drop-down box. 9 If you want to specify data compression options, domain templates to be applied during migration, or remote host‘s hard drive partitions that should be used for storing temporary files, click the Advanced tab, and select the required options. 10 Click Next>>.
Serving Your Customers To migrate domain names, select the Domains tab and specify which domains should be migrated by selecting the corresponding check boxes, then click Migrate. On the next screen, select which user account on the Plesk server you want to migrate the domains to. Then, click Migrate. 12 Select the IP address on your Plesk host, to which the remote host‘s IP addresses should be mapped. 13 Click Migrate.
Serving Your Customers 221 Performing Migration Within a Single Server If you wish to migrate to Plesk 8 from another hosting platform or earlier versions of Plesk, and cannot afford additional hardware for this operation, you can do it using the data import feature of Plesk Migration Manager. To migrate your data using data import feature: 1 Mount the disk with an existing Plesk installation. 2 Choose the migration agent suitable for your source hosting platform.
Serving Your Customers 6 If agent suits your platform, you will be able to make a copy of all data using the option –dump-all, or make a copy of selected entities using the option –dump-domains for migrating domains, or –dumpaccounts for migrating user accounts (you can run the migration agent with –h option for details). For example: -dump-domains=domain1, domain2, domain3.
CHAPTER 10 Backing Up and Restoring Your Data With the current version of backup and restore utilities installed with your control panel, you can: Back up the entire server. You can do this only through the command line.
Backing Up and Restoring Your Data Backing Up the Entire Server To backup the server configuration settings and all user data you have on your hosting machine: 1 Log in as root to your server. 2 Change to the directory, where Plesk is installed: cd /plesk_installation_directory/bin 3 Run the following command: ./pleskbackup all Where the is a target backup file name with absolute or relative path. The data will be backed up without disruption of hosting services and downtime.
Backing Up and Restoring Your Data 225 11 Click Back Up Now. 12 The backup will start and the progress will be shown. To update the information on the screen, click Refresh. 13 Upon completion of the backup process, click OK. The backup file will be saved to the repository you selected, and will be accessible either from the FTP server, or from the location Clients > client name > Backup.
Backing Up and Restoring Your Data Day of the Month - enter the value from 1 to 31 Month - enter the value from 1 to 12, or select the month from a drop-down box Day of the Week - enter the value from 0 to 6 (0 for Sunday), or select the day of the week from a drop-down box You can schedule the time using the UNIX crontab entry format. In this format, you can enter several values separated by commas. Two numbers separated by a hyphen mean an inclusive range.
Backing Up and Restoring Your Data 227 11 Select the domains to back up. To back up all domains, select the check box in the upper left corner of the list of domains. To back up individual domains, select the corresponding check boxes in the list of domains. 12 Click the Switch On icon in the Tools group. 13 Click OK. To schedule backup of a single domain (web site): 1 2 3 4 Click Click Click Click the the the the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. domain name you need.
Backing Up and Restoring Your Data Optimizing Server Performance If you serve numerous web sites, you may want to configure the scheduled backup and restore processes, so that they do not consume much server resources. To reduce the server load: 1 Go to Server > Backup Settings. 2 Specify the number of simultaneous backup processes in the Maximum number of simultaneously running scheduled backup processes box. The default value is 10. Type a lesser value.
Backing Up and Restoring Your Data 229 Restoring Data From Backup Archives You can restore data backed up by Plesk 7.5.4 control panel. Before you restore such data, you need to log in as root to your server and run the conversion utility for each backup file created by 7.5.4 as follows: plesk_installation_directory/bin/backup-convert.
Backing Up and Restoring Your Data 3 Click the Backup icon in the Tools group. 4 If you wish to restore data from a file stored on an FTP server, click the FTP Repository tab. 5 6 7 8 Click the backup file name you need. Select the Restore client's preferences and account details check box. Select the domains that you would like to restore. Click Next >>.
Backing Up and Restoring Your Data 231 Maintaining Backup Files Repository Domain backups are usually stored in separate backup repositories for each domain hosted on your server. They are accessed by clicking Domains shortcut, clicking the required domain name and clicking Backup.
Backing Up and Restoring Your Data Downloading Backup Files from Server To download a backup file from a backup repository within the control panel: 1 Access the repository you need. To access a repository of a specific client, click the Clients shortcut in the navigation pane, click the user name you need, and then click the Backup icon in the Tools group.
Backing Up and Restoring Your Data 233 Configuring Control Panel for Using FTP Repository If you are going to use an FTP server for storing backup files, you should set up the control panel appropriately: 1 Navigate to the repository you need: For a repository on a client account level, go to Clients > client name > Back Up > FTP Repository > FTP Account Properties. For a repository on a domain level, go to Domains > domain name > Back Up > FTP Repository > FTP Account Properties.
CHAPTER 11 Viewing Statistics To view the information on server usage: 1 Click the Server shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the Statistics icon in the System group. The following information will be presented: Processor information. Plesk version and build number. Operating system and its kernel version. Plesk license key number. Server uptime. Processor load averages for the last 1 minute, 5 minutes and 15 minutes. The amount of RAM installed and used.
Viewing Statistics 235 To view a detailed report on server resources and hosting features used by a specific domain name/web site: 1 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the domain name you need. 3 Click the Report icon. Common operations on reports: To get more details, select the Full Report option from the Report drop-down menu.
Viewing Statistics To view the bandwidth usage by FTP, Web and mail services in this domain, click the Traffic icon. Note: If you use the Webalizer statistical package on your account, you can customize the graphical reports shown by Webalizer. For instructions, refer to the Adjusting Preferences for Web Statistics Presentation by Webalizer (see page 236) section. Alternately, you can view the Web statistics for a site by visiting the following URL: https://your-domain.com/plesk-stat/webstat.
Viewing Statistics 237 Hiding and Unhiding Internal References from Your and Other Sites To hide the internal references or references from other sites: 1 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 3 4 5 6 7 Click the domain name you need. Click the Report icon. Click the Web Statistics Preferences icon. Click the Hide Entries icon. In the Entry type drop-down box, leave the Referrer value selected.
Viewing Statistics Grouping and Ungrouping References from Other Sites To group references from a specific site: 1 2 3 4 5 Click Click Click Click Click the the the the the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. domain name you need. Report icon. Web Statistics Preferences icon. Grouped referrers tab. 6 Click the Group Referrers icon. 7 Type the group name that you wish to be shown for all referrers on the specific site.
Viewing Statistics 239 Hiding and Unhiding Direct Requests To hide direct requests: 1 2 3 4 5 Click Click Click Click Click the the the the the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. domain name you need. Report icon. Web Statistics Preferences icon. Hide Entries icon. 6 In the Entry type drop-down box, select the Direct request value. 7 Click OK. To unhide direct requests: 1 Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the domain name you need. 3 Click the Report icon.
Viewing Statistics Automating Report Generation and Delivery by E-mail To receive consolidated reports on one or several user accounts on a regular basis: 1 Go to Clients > client name > Report > Layouts > report type > Report Delivery > New Delivery Schedule. 2 To receive the report to your e-mail address registered with the system, select the the server administrator value from the Deliver to dropdown menu.
Viewing Statistics 241 3 To receive a report on a given domain/web site, leave this domain option selected. To receive detailed reports on each domain that belongs to a given user account, select the all domains of this client option. To receive reports on all domains hosted on the server, select the all domains option. 4 Select the delivery interval from the Delivery frequency drop-down menu and click OK. You can have the report delivered each day, each week, or each month.
Viewing Statistics Viewing Log Files and Configuring Recycling of Log Files All connections to the Web server and requests for files that were not found on the server are registered in log files. These log files are analyzed by the statistical utilities running on the server, which then present graphical reports on demand. You may want to download these log files to your computer for processing by third-party statistical utilities, or view their contents for web server debugging purposes.
CHAPTER 12 Monitoring Connections to Control Panel and FTP Services In this chapter: Monitoring Connections to Control Panel .......................................................... 243 Monitoring Connections to FTP Service ............................................................ 244 Monitoring Connections to Control Panel To find out who of your customers is logged in to the control panel at the moment: 1 Click Sessions in the navigation pane.
Monitoring Connections to Control Panel and FTP Services Monitoring Connections to FTP Service To find out who is connected to your server via FTP, in what directories they currently are and what files they are uploading to or downloading from the server: 1 Click Sessions in the navigation pane. 2 Click the FTP Sessions tab. All sessions including yours will be presented and the following details will be displayed: Type.
CHAPTER 13 Logging Actions Performed by Your Customers in the Control Panel You may wish to keep track of actions performed by various users in the system. All actions will be recorded in a log file that you will be able to download for viewing.
Logging Actions Performed by Your Customers in the Control Panel Web user account created, deleted, changed Site application installed, reconfigured, uninstalled Site application package installed, uninstalled, updated License key expired or updated Database server created, deleted, updated Database created or deleted Database user account created, deleted, updated Client's GUID updated Domain's GUID updated Plesk component was updated or added In this chapter: Sett
Logging Actions Performed by Your Customers in the Control Panel Downloading the Action Log To download the action log to your machine: 1 Go to Server > Action Log. 2 In the Log files section, select the time period using the drop-down boxes, and click Download. The dialog window will open, prompting you to select the location for the downloaded log file to be saved to. 3 Select the location, and click Save. Clearing the Action Log To clear the action log: 1 Go to Server > Action Log.
CHAPTER 14 Using Centralized Access to Your Numerous Plesk Servers If you have a number of Plesk-managed servers, you can use the control panel on one of your servers for accessing and managing the other servers. To check if this feature is available within your control panel, see if there is the Master shortcut in the navigation pane.
Using Centralized Access to Your Numerous Plesk Servers 249 Adding a Server Record To add a record on a Plesk-managed server to your control panel: 1 Go to Master > Add New Server. 2 Enter the hostname and port number (8443) in the respective fields, specify login name and password for Plesk to be able to log on to the given slave server. You may also wish to type in a description for the slave server.
Using Centralized Access to Your Numerous Plesk Servers 3 To log in to the server's control panel, click the respective icon. Removing a Server Record To remove a server record: 1 Click the Master shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Select the check box corresponding to the record you wish to remove. 3 Click Remove Selected. Then, confirm removal and click OK.
CHAPTER 15 Upgrading Your Control Panel You can easily install the necessary updates, control panel add-ons, and even upgrade your control panel to the latest available release using Plesk Updater function within your control panel. To upgrade your Plesk control panel or update its components: 1 Click the Server shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the Updater icon in the Services group. The control panel connects to the Parallels official Plesk Update server at URL http://autoinstall.plesk.
Upgrading Your Control Panel In this chapter: Changing Updater Settings ............................................................................... 253 Blocking Access to Updater Functions from the Control Panel ..........................
Upgrading Your Control Panel 253 Changing Updater Settings By default, updates for Plesk and updates for your operating system are downloaded from the official Plesk Update server at http://autoinstall.plesk.com. If you want to receive Plesk updates from a local network storage, do the following: 1 Click the Server shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click the Updater icon in the Services group. 3 Click Preferences. 4 Click the Plesk Update Source tab.
Upgrading Your Control Panel Blocking Access to Updater Functions from the Control Panel If you delegate server administration tasks to other users, but do not want them to use the Updater function or change the updating settings from the control panel, you can remove the screens related to Updater settings and the Updater icon from the control panel. To do this, use the following MySQL command: echo 'REPLACE misc SET param="disable_updater", val="true"' | mysql psa -uadmin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.
CHAPTER 16 Appendix A. Advanced Features In addition to operations available via control panel, Plesk software provides several advanced management capabilities, available to the administrator from the command line.
Appendix A. Advanced Features Adding Event Handlers Let's, for example, create an event handler for the 'client account creation' event. The handler will accept a client name and the client's login from environment variables. For simplicity we will use a shell-script called test-handler.sh that looks as follows: #!/bin/bash echo "--------------" >> /tmp/event_handler.log /bin/date >> /tmp/event_handler.log # information on the event date and time /usr/bin/id >> /tmp/event_handler.
Appendix A. Advanced Features 257 7 In the Command input field, specify a command to be executed upon the selected event. In our example it is /usr/local/psa/bin/test-handler.sh. 8 Click OK. Note: In the script, we have specified the variables $NEW_CONTACT_NAME and $NEW_LOGIN_NAME. During execution of the handler, they will be replaced with name and login of the created client respectively. The entire list of available variables is provided in the following section.
Appendix A.
Appendix A.
Appendix A.
Appendix A.
Appendix A.
Appendix A.
Appendix A.
Appendix A.
Appendix A.
Appendix A.
Appendix A.
Appendix A.
Appendix A.
Appendix A.
Appendix A.
Appendix A.
Appendix A.
Appendix A.
Appendix A. Advanced Features For the events 'Client's GUID updated', 'Domain's GUID updated' Globally unique identifier (GUID) OLD_GUID NEW_GUID Required Removing Event Handlers To remove an event handler: 1 Select the Server shortcut in the navigation pane. 2 Click Event Manager in the Control Panel group. 3 Select the corresponding check boxes in the list of handlers and click Remove selected.
Appendix A. Advanced Features 277 Including Directives into Web Server Configuration File You can include domain-specific Apache configuration directives into web server configuration file. In Plesk each domain has virtual hosts configuration stored in a separate file httpd.include. On all Linux systems, this file is located in the directory /var/www/vhosts//conf/. On FreeBSD systems, this file is located in the directory /usr/local/psa/home/vhosts//conf/.
Appendix A. Advanced Features Changing Tomcat Java Connector Ports The default port numbers for Coyote and Warp connectors in Plesk are 9080 and 9008. If you want Tomcat Java to work on other ports (e.g.
Appendix A. Advanced Features 279 Restoring Mail Configuration Sometimes, Plesk mail server configuration becomes corrupt and it is necessary to restore it. The restoration is carried out by internal mchk utility, intended for use by Plesk Control Panel. However, as administrator, you can use it for restoring the Qmail and Courier-imap configuration when needed. By default mchk is running in the background mode. To execute it in the foreground, use the -v option.
Appendix A. Advanced Features Installing SSL Certificate for Qmail To install a custom SSL certificate for Qmail on a Plesk server, follow these steps: 1 Create a combined .pem certificate file. To create a combined .pem certificate file, start your favorite text editor and paste the contents of each certificate file and the private key in the file in the following order: 1. The private key 2. The primary certificate 3. The intermediate certificate 4.
Appendix A. Advanced Features 281 For example for RedHat or Fedora operating systems, the SSL certificate file that you need to back up is var/qmail/control/servercert.pem. Note: For other operating systems, the default certificate file location may be different. 6 Open the default certificate file var/qmail/control/servercert.pem by using your favorite text editor and replace the contents of the file with the content of the combined certificate file plesk.pem. 7 Save and close the file.
Appendix A. Advanced Features Installing SSL Certificates for Courier-IMAP Mail Server To install a custom SSL certificate for the Courier-IMAP (IMAP/POP3) mail server on a Plesk server, follow these steps: 1 Log in to a Plesk server through SSH as a root user. 2 Download one or more SSL certificate files that you want to install. Note: IMAP and POP3 each require separate certificate files, but both files can contain same certificate.
Appendix A. Advanced Features 5 Save and close the file. 6 To finish the certificate installation, restart Courier-IMAP.
