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??? Faulty Product or Failed Instalation ???

S

SpidermonBob

Guest
Can someone please help me make sense out of this situation. (Sorry for the lengthy post but there are some aspects of this problem that are both procedural and technical) .

I have been a loyal user of Plesk and have upgraded on three previous occasions. On each of those occasions the upgrades have always been flawless.

I purchased a new server running PleskPlus (psa v8.1.0_build81061226.14 os_Debian 3.1) as a result of my primary domain (primary-domain.com) expiring without me receiving notification. I had evacuated from Hurricane Katrina and was unable to receive postal mail from my domain registrar. My original server was using (ns1.primary-domain.com & ns1.primary-domain.com for its name servers). I did not notice the problem at first since the new owner had not reassigned ns1 & ns2 to different IP addresses. At the same time the original server was being hit by denial of service email attacks (probably because other domains were expiring with out notice). At the time I was consumed with trying to financially recover from the hurricane and a death in my family. My mind was not focused on my server. To be honest I was quite negligent in respect to my domain names and the server. It soon became obvious that my large network of interconnected domains was becoming unwoven and commissions I was receiving from affiliate programs almost totally stopped. In an attempt to recover from the secondary and tertiary effects of this devastating experience I took the balance of my available money and purchased a new server.

After speaking to a person at the Plesk Sales dept. I decided to purchase Plesk Plus and SiteBuilder and have SwSoft do the installation, since my hosting company only supports c-panel and not Plesk.

My first mistake was, that because it was late and the sales office was closed I purchased Plesk Plus, SiteBuilder and the installation online. I did not realize that by purchasing on line that I have eliminated myself from any post-sales support and would have to wait until the online sales group decided to install it. Previously my discussions with sales I was to receive immediate installation and assistance in configuring a complex Named Virtual Host Scheme that I use to interconnect all of my domains.

I filled out a trouble ticket to indicate to online sales that my situation was an emergency and that I had been promised immediate installation. I provided the access rights to the server as required and the contact information at my hosting company so that the installation could be coordinated correctly.

Upon notification that the installation had been completed I logged into the server and found a totally different environment than I had expected and realized that migrating over all the domains was not going to be an easy task. After spending a week reading through the documentation and reconfiguring domain and user accounts I proceeded to migrate some of the content over to the new server. My first attempt to do an FTP transfer failed and I erroneously attributed the problem to a Name Server / DNS issue (as per the above domain name loss issue).

It appears that a number of critical ports were never opened (including FTP) and SiteBuilder was only accessible via an extremely ugly IP based URL. ( http://Sitebuildew.[url]www.12x.12x.12x.12x/[/url] ). Again I thought this was due to the Name Server / DNS issue.

After I had the ports opened I was able to FTP some content to the main IP address of the server, however I could not access other IP addresses that I had been assigned. After applying my assigned IP #s I realized that I had to be extremely careful and that since I had no access to (primary-domain.com) I could not reassign ns1 & ns2 to the new IP addresses. The potential for a catastrophic disaster was extremely possible and that all content on the old server including email accounts (and email in those accounts and new incoming email) would probably be lost and that reversing the process if it failed was impossible).

At this point I am paranoid. And at this point I could not find anyone, no matter how technical qualified, who could understand the scope of my dilemma. A few days went by before I again attempted to log into the server, only to find a notice that my licensee had expired. At this point I am outside of the one-month warrantee and could not access customer support directly, but must now correspond by email. Apparently I was only issued a temporary licensee for the installation.

After correcting the license issue I again attempted to try SiteBuilder. It still didn’t work, and nothing in the documentation, the knowledge base or this forum was of any assistance. I again put SiteBuilder on the back burner to attend to the more serious issue of migrating the domains to the new server.

After moving over some of my primary client domains to the new server I attempted to upgrade Plesk as suggested in my control panel. All indications were that the upgrade was successful, until I started getting calls from my clients that they were unable to receive or send email. I attempted to restart Qmail only to find that it would not restart… I filled out a trouble ticket for this incident and again included the fact that SiteBuilder still did not work. After approximately one week I was given instruction as to what could be wrong. Eventually SwSoft fixed the problem and reconfigured SiteBuilder and corrected the ugly URL problem. I could now access SiteBuilder but it still did not seem to function correctly. Again I went back to the documentation, the knowledge base, and the threads of this forum. Over the last year I have attempted to use SiteBuilder and it still will not publish a website successfully. However I can take ownership of a site and configure the name server record of my domains to access it in a framed mode so that it appears to work.

In a desperate attempt to again generate some income so that I can now support both my old and new servers I decided to use SiteBuilder in the framed mode I just described. I set up a site to both describe the functioning of SiteBuilder and to use the eCart feature to sell some of my services. After two weeks of dealing with quirky problems of content getting lost when changing the structure of pages I was finally ready to test the program before going live with the site. I created a $5 item and proceeded to purchase it from myself with PayPal only to find that initiating a PayPal transaction generates a blank screen and a email notification being sent out. Terrific, my customers can now purchase my products and services without actually completing the payment portion of the process.

I am at my wit’s end and ABSOLUTELY aggravated that I have spent over a year trying to get what I thought was a real product to function.

From day-one nothing has functioned correctly, considering the fact that I took a brand new server and had expensive software installed by the company who created it and supposedly charges money to support it. Yes, I paid for the product, its installation and I would have thought it would have been configured correctly.

I have contacted the sales department, online sales, and customer support and it appears that no one gives a damn that the use of their product is putting me out of business. At this point my SUS for each product has expired (for lack of revenue) and I am totally without recourse. Since it expired I am no longer entitled to the upgrades that were available before the expiration and my cost to renew is now 60% rather than 25% .

At this point I am hoping that some reading this thread will have some suggestions as to how I can get SiteBuilder to work, for it is my contention that neither Plesk nor SiteBuilder was ever configured correctly. Nor am I convinced that the upgrading of both Plesk from 8.0.1 to 8.1.0 or upgrading SiteBuilder from SB2 to SB3 has not created an unresolvable problem.



Apparently no one at SwSoft seems to be concerned, since neither my email or calls are currently being returned.

Obviously any thoughts I had for purchasing HSComplete, Virtuoso, and additional Plesk Servers is currently being jeopardized as is my future business plans.




Any help and/or moral support on this issue would be greatly be appreciated...

... again sorry for the long post, but I think the details put all the issues involved here in their proper perspective.
 
even check.php does not work...

If check.php does not work and returns the following error what can you conclude?

"The file /var/www/vhosts/my-domain.com/httpdocs/check.php was encoded with the PHP 5 ionCube Encoder, and requires PHP 5 to be installed."
 
I can only suggest here to create support incidents right after some issues occurred and you could not find any helpful information on forum or kb. Do not hesitate and contact with support team. they should help to resolve situations.

As for Sitebuilder product most probably there is still some misconfiguration on the server or something, as this product works fine and a lot of customers use it. Please make sure that you are using correct check.php file, this should be /usr/local/sitebuilder/resources/publish/check.php
After it uploaded into httpdocs/ folder for domain make sure to set correct ownership for it, so further work with this domain will not be affected.
If you still have any problems with Sitebuilder please let me know here. Just list them all with detailed description (as it was done upper) and I will try to help you here within shortest period of time.
 
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