"The mind of a Mad Tech!"

If your FTP connection through Plesk fails, there are a few things you can check first.

1. Log into the server via SSH (if you are using windows, you will need a SSH client. I use Putty

2. Make sure you access su (root access).

Now that you are logged in, type te following;

ftp localhost

If you get the message of;

Connected to localhost(127.0.0.1).
220 ProFTPD 1.3.0 Server(ProFTPD)[127.0.0.1]
Name(localhost:user):

Then the ftp server is working correctly. However if you do not get that, but instead get this;

Tags: FTP, Linux, Plesk

Typically when you remove a file or files from plesk, in order to reclaim space it doesn’t always update and shows the space in use incorrectly.

Running the following via SSH will correct the issue;

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/statistics –calculate-one –domain-name=Domain_name.com

Tags: Linux, Plesk, space

By default, the maximum number of concurrent connections from one ip in Qmail (plesk) is set to 4. Anymore than that and it will start to fail or reject the connections. Normally this isn’t an issue, but if you use an email client that tries to establish more than 4 connections at once, you will run into an issue.

To bypass this, you can edit the following files and change the MAXPERIP value to a different number. Remember, however the path’s may be different depending on your OS, so if it’s not the same as the path’s I list, you will need to locate/find or Grep for them. The path’s and files are;

/etc/courier-imap/imapd

/etc/courier-imap/pop3d

(another path is also /usr/lib/courier-imap/etc/imapd and /usr/lib/courier-imap/etc/pop3d)

Once you’ve made the edits, you will need to restart the mail service;

/etc/init.d/courier-imap stop and /etc/init.d/courier-imap start

=)

Tags: MAXPERIP, Plesk, Qmail

Plesk does support MySql 5, however only with Plesk 8.1 and beyond. If you are using an earlier version of Plesk, you will be able to upgrade to MySql 5, however it will and has broken Plesk to the point where it is unusable.

“Plesk Control Panel fully supports MySQL 5 since Plesk 8.1 version. It means that there are no point in Plesk code which conflicts with MySQL 5 and if you replace mysql4 with MySQL 5, it does not affect Plesk itself, all the SQL requests Plesk sends to MySQL from any Plesk’s place will be processed without problems. There are no dependencies which do not allow mysql5 be installed.

If you are running Plesk version below than 8.1, you should upgrade to Plesk 8.1 first, then upgrade Mysql. Otherwise, if you upgrade MySQL to the 5th version on the server running Plesk 8.0.x or older, Plesk functioning and upgrade to further versions problems are possible.

Mysql 5 should be taken from the OS distribution and installed by means of the OS package manage in order to avoid possible dependencies conflicts.”

Tags: MySql 5 Support, Plesk

If you happen to notice that your server (dedicated or vps) is running at 100% cpu usage or close to it, and you notice the following that qmail is using all of your cpu usage;

---

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
28141 qmaild 25 0 4600 1376 1168 R 27 0.1 0:28.09 qmail-smtpd
27851 qmaild 25 0 4708 1372 1168 R 26 0.1 1:23.48 qmail-smtpd
28268 qmaild 25 0 3948 1372 1168 R 24 0.1 0:05.79 qmail-smtpd
27507 qmaild 25 0 4468 1372 1168 R 23 0.1 1:56.58 qmail-smtpd
28244 qmaild 25 0 4520 1372 1168 R 20 0.1 0:06.82 qmail-smtpd
28045 qmaild 25 0 3820 1376 1168 R 20 0.1 0:48.50 qmail-smtpd
28117 qmaild 25 0 3724 1372 1168 R 20 0.1 0:33.20 qmail-smtpd
28118 qmaild 25 0 4452 1372 1168 R 20 0.1 0:33.59 qmail-smtpd
28163 qmaild 25 0 5200 1380 1168 R 20 0.1 0:25.30 qmail-smtpd

You can check on the /var/qmail/control directory for 2 files;

dh512.pem
dh1024.pem
If you don’t see them or with another naming (dhparam512 and dhparam1024), rename them accordingly.

After that, you will need to restart qmail and xinetd;

# service qmail restart

# service xinetd restart

Without dh512.pem and dh1024.pem, qmail has to create certificate and key pairs when other mail servers or mail users connect to qmail via TLS. If qmail is forced to create them on the fly, you will see a huge performance hit, and your load will be higher than it normally should be. By copying the dhparam files over, you will pre-populate the SSL key and certificate for qmail to use, and all it has to do is pick it up off the file system rather than regenerating it each time, thus saving your cpu usage from maxing out. Usually it will drop your cpu usage.

Tags: Plesk, Qmail