When ordering a new VPS box from my hosting provider, I was pleased to see they had upgraded to Plesk 9.5. However, I was disappointed to find out it wasn’t running automatically on https://MYIPADDRESS:8443/ (which obviously makes it impossible to log in and configure the first time). So I rolled up my sleeves, SSH’ed in and got to work.
The first hint of a problem was the Apache error I got when I tried to bounce plesk:
[root@tisailing ~]# /usr/local/psa/admin/bin/websrvmng -a /usr/sbin/httpd: error while loading shared libraries: libldap-2.3.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory websrvmng: get_apache_path: '/usr/sbin/httpd -V' failed websrvmng: get_apache_path: '/usr/sbin/httpd -V' failed
This was odd, but easy enough to fix:
# yum update # service psa restart
Then at the link you get:
ERROR: PleskFatalException StatInfo->getProductVersion failed: file_get_contents() failed: mktime() [function.mktime]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. Please use the date.timezone setting, the TZ environment variable or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/Los_Angeles' for 'PDT/-7.0/DST' instead 0: common_func.php3:146 psaerror(string 'StatInfo->getProductVersion failed: file_get_contents() failed: mktime() [function.mktime]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. Please use the date.timezone setting, the TZ environment variable or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/Los_Angeles' for 'PDT/-7.0/DST' instead') 1: common_func.php3:66 getProductLoginVersion() 2: SP.php:101 ssoGetSpName() 3: SP.php:393 SsoSpConfig->load() 4: SP.php:215 SsoSpConfig->__construct() 5: SP.php:223 SsoSpConfig::getInstance() 6: SP.php:447 SsoSpConfig() 7: RelyingParty.php:19 isSsoEnabled() 8: auth.php3:185
Uh, OK. A bit of Googling yields this blog posting, so add the proper OS and Plesk version strings to /usr/local/psa/version and restart Plesk via service psa restart.
Then the Plesk login screen at least comes up. I ran into a number of non-blocking error messages (all related to the DNS configuration) as I created my administrator account so we’ll see if any of those come back to bite me later, but so far it seems to be behaving normally.
One thing I did notice, was that /etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf was not properly set up to handle PHP scripts. If you get a “download file” dialog, then change
<IfModule mime_module> AddType application/x-httpd-php .php AddType text/html .php AddHandler application/x-httpd-php php </IfModule>
to
<IfModule mod_php> AddType application/x-httpd-php .php AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php AddHandler application/php5-script .php </IfModule>