Archive for April, 2009

I may be wrong here, but I believe the default queue lifetime for a message sitting in the qmail queue is 7 days. To me, that's entirely too long to wait to deliver a defunct message considering most of them are probably SPAM bounces anyway.

Here is how to shorten the lifetime.

Change to the qmail control directory, assuming you use default locations on your server.

Set the timeout to the number of seconds you want the message to remain in the queue. This is done in the queuelifetime file. This file doesn't normally exist by default. I'll use 24 hours (86,400 seconds) as an example.

Restart qmail.

That's it. Messages that don't get delivered in 24 hours will be gone.

Change to the Postfix configuration directory. Usually this is in /etc/postfix.

Open the sender_access file or create it if it doesn't exist.

Add the email address you want rejected on a new line in the file followed by REJECT.

Save the file.

Create the server_access database with the postmap command

Edit the main.cf file and add the following

Restart Postfix

Check your logs to make sure everything is good.

First, copy the smtp_psa file.

Edit the newly copied file and replace the first line. Replace 'service smtp' with 'service submission'

Restart xinetd.d

Check that port 587 is listening on the server

Upgrading Plesk from 7.5.4 to 8.0.1 the easy way. If you are going from an 8.x version to higher 8.x version, you can go straight to editing the sources file and then up2date psa.

Run the script HERE first.

After running the script, follow theses steps (as applicable)

Edit /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources and put this in:

Turn off signed packages by changing useGPG=1 to be useGPG=0 in /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date

=====UPGRADES=====
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Plesk Upgrades

This living document aspires to provide best practices for Plesk upgrades
that result in less downtime for customers and reduced work for technicians.
One of the newest features of this tutorial is that packages can be resolved
and downloaded prior to the actual maintenance. See plesk-prefetch.html

Release notes / Changelogs
download1.parallels.com/Plesk/Plesk8.3/plesk-8.3.0-for-rpm-based-oses.html
download1.parallels.com/Plesk/Plesk8.4/plesk-8.4.0-for-rpm-based-os.html
download1.parallels.com/Plesk/Plesk8.6/plesk-8.6.0-for-rpm-based-os.html
download1.parallels.com/Plesk/PPP9/plesk-9.0.0-for-rpm-based-os.html

Version Hopping

2 -> 5 -> 6 -> 7 -> 7.5 -> 8.6

You can go directly from 7.5 to any higher version but should follow the
upgrade path listed above for prior releases. Technically, the RPMs specify
that direct upgrades from version 6 to any version are supported but this
has yet to be tested. I have recently gone 7.5.2 directly to 8.6 on RHEL4
with no issues.

Plesk 7.5+ works with PHP5+

Plesk 8.1.0 introduced MySQL5 compatibility

Plesk 8.2.1 introduced yum repositories, if you are coming from a version
prior to 7.5, you will need to use older methods like using the RPM tarball

Prerequisites

Networking-fu

## I generally have faith in the mysqldump that the psa RPM produces but you may make an extra if you think
that it's a good idea. See /var/lib/psa/dumps/mysql.preupgrade.dump.gz

Resolve *all* updates first (except kernel, skip list may be of use in edge
cases)

# <= RHEL4

# RHEL5

MAGIC (Not needed on RHEL5):

Set:

## noReplaceConfig will allow things that have modified configuration files to be upgraded (courier-imap)

## useGPG makes me sad but Plesk does not sign their packages

Determine which sources to use. Find them at the bottom of this post.

Add sources for appropriate RHEL/Plesk combination

# <= RHEL4

# RHEL5

# <= RHEL4

# RHEL5
Doing a "dry-run" with yum:

To skip that:

# <= RHEL4

# RHEL5

Clean-up

# <= RHEL4

# RHEL5

* Check GUI for additional updates and license issues
* make sure you can at least get to some sites
* Check some sites, POP, SMTP and FTP.
* Check for defunct processes, high load, etc

* Make sure that /var/qmail/control/dh1024.pem exists, see below

If there is no /var/qmail/control/dh1024.pem

Troubleshooting

If coming from psa7.5 to 8.x

On RHEL 5 with yum, you might see:

filelists.xml.gz 100% |=========================| 10 MB 00:39
Error: failed to retrieve repodata/filelists.xml.gz from rhel-x86_64-server-5
error was [Errno -1] Metadata file does not match checksum

Try:

If it still does not work, get around this perform the upgrade with: (You have already performed other updates right?)

These sorts of issuses are supposed to be resolved in rhel5.3

If you are having a problem where you can't install packages from autoinstaller in rhel5 and it wants to do silly things with glibc, remove apache or something like
that, drop in the repos as described above and yum install them. This is because yum is not fully supported by Parrallels and the autoinstaller fails back to the old
filefetcher method. Their support refuses to admit this and claims that it was fixed in 8.6

On RHEL5.2 I had to do the following first to install Plesk 9.0:

If you are running 9.0 and short name mail auth is not working, you have been switched to Postfix. Go back to qmail by installing

If you are having real troubles updating to Plesk > 8 on RHEL3 due to SpamAssassin issues, you might try

The older header files may be causing a conflict.
Worst case:

To disable PHP safe mode for all domains:

=====UPGRADE SOURCES======

RHEL 4 386 8.2.1
yum product-distr-rpms http://autoinstall.plesk.com/PSA_8.2.1/dist-rpm-RedHat-el4-i386
yum thirdparty-rpms http://autoinstall.plesk.com/PSA_8.2.1/thirdparty-rpm-RedHat-el4-i386
yum product-updates-rpms http://autoinstall.plesk.com/PSA_8.2.1/update-rpm-RedHat-el4-i386

RHEL 4 386 8.3
yum plesk-dist-rpms http://autoinstall.plesk.com/PSA_8.3.0/dist-rpm-RedHat-el4-i386
yum plesk-thirdparty-rpms http://autoinstall.plesk.com/PSA_8.3.0/thirdparty-rpm-RedHat-el4-i386
yum product-updates-rpms http://autoinstall.plesk.com/PSA_8.3.0/update-rpm-RedHat-el4-i386

RHEL 4 386 8.3 Kitchen sink
yum plesk-dist-rpms http://autoinstall.plesk.com/PSA_8.3.0/dist-rpm-RedHat-el4-i386/
yum plesk-thirdparty-rpms http://autoinstall.plesk.com/PSA_8.3.0/thirdparty-rpm-RedHat-el4-i386/
yum sitebuilder-dist-rpms http://autoinstall.plesk.com/SiteBuilder/SiteBuilder_4.2.0/dist-rpm-RedHat-el4-i386
yum sitebuilder-thirdparty-rpms http://autoinstall.plesk.com/SiteBuilder/SiteBuilder_4.2.0/thirdparty-rpm-RedHat-el4-i386
yum sso-dist-rpms http://autoinstall.plesk.com/SSO_2.0/dist-rpm-RedHat-el4-i386
yum sso-thirdparty-rpms http://autoinstall.plesk.com/SSO_2.0/thirdparty-rpm-RedHat-el4-i386

RHEL 4 386 8.4
yum plesk-dist-rpms http://autoinstall.plesk.com/PSA_8.4.0/dist-rpm-RedHat-el4-i386
yum plesk-thirdparty-rpms http://autoinstall.plesk.com/PSA_8.4.0/thirdparty-rpm-RedHat-el4-i386
yum product-updates-rpms http://autoinstall.plesk.com/PSA_8.4.0/update-rpm-RedHat-el4-i386

RHEL 4 386 8.6
yum plesk-dist-rpms http://autoinstall.plesk.com/PSA_8.6.0/dist-rpm-RedHat-el4-i386
yum plesk-thirdparty-rpms http://autoinstall.plesk.com/PSA_8.6.0/thirdparty-rpm-RedHat-el4-i386
yum product-updates-rpms http://autoinstall.plesk.com/PSA_8.6.0/update-rpm-RedHat-el4-i386

RHEL 4 386 9.0
yum plesk-dist-rpms http://autoinstall.plesk.com/PSA_9.0.0/dist-rpm-RedHat-el4-i386/
yum plesk-thirdparty-rpms http://autoinstall.plesk.com/PSA_9.0.0/thirdparty-rpm-RedHat-el4-i386/
yum product-updates-rpms http://autoinstall.plesk.com/PSA_9.0.0/update-rpm-RedHat-el4-i386/

When having to migrate hugh numbers of IP addresses on Plesk, here is a way to manipulate the database to do it without having to use the panel to do them one at a time.