Have SWSoft done it again?

[joelmoss]

After looking carefully through these forums since the release of 7.5.4, it seems that SWSoft may have done it again, and have released software that is full of bugs.

I have simply made it company policy not to upgrade Plesk until a release has been available for at least 4 weeks, as we have experienced so many problems with previous upgrades. So I have not yet upgraded to 7.5.4, as I wanted to see how it all went.

Am I right in saying that this release also contains quite a few bugs that affects the running of Plesk and its related services? Or is it indeed safe to upgrade?

 

[bartje3]

Hi,

I'm also waiting some weeks to see how others made it true the bunch of bugs. It's not worth to provide always the latest update to your customers, when you'll have to pay for it with hours of fixing...
For me it is better to collect all the solutions from others (or sometimes from SWSoft) and do the update afterwards.

Bart

 

[dschn]

Add me to that camp as well.

These forums and the 'HELP ME OH MY GOD' posts is a good way of judging a patch's bugs and ease of installation. That said, I'm waiting awhile to see how things turn out before diving into 7.5.4.

 

[joelmoss]

Then I suppose the question is; why do SWSoft keep releasing software that has not been sufficiently tested? I mean, we are not just talking about minor bugs here. Most bugs that are complained about are major and ones that affect the running of Plesk or its associated services.

 

[sieb@]

My upgrade from .3 to .4 was fine. Only bug I found was with the Watchdog module. But then again, I keep my servers fairly bare and don't do alot of customization for this reason.

 

[PaulC]

I am in the same same boat as Sieb - I believe we both use FreeBSD as well

 

[sieb@]

I've got CentOS3 boxes for production. But I did a test load of .4 on FreeBSD and it went fine also.

 

[Whistler]

Also should be mentioned (and I don't mean to patronize anyone) - many many problems here is not because of buggy software - but a symptom of Plesk being used by and sold to people who don't know how to work their OS.

Apart from the Watchdog bug and a couple of other errors (not sure if these are a result for my upgrading Perl or a bug in Plesk) I must say that Plesk 7.5.4 seems to be very stable, fast and a good product.

And need I add: loved by my customers for the easy and very intuitive Control Panel Interface.

 

[k.satirli]

I can relate to Whistler,

while I dont have customers on my server, I use Plesk quite a lot and upgraded to .4 without any problems at all.

nothing that stopped working and except the watchdog's gui - all seems good enough for me.

I dont consider myself a linux pro, but I know that I havent had any problems since .4

 

[joelmoss]

Ok, so it seems that there are not as many problems as I first thought. How about we build a list of known bugs in 7.5.4. List them here and it will help users like me who are still cautious about upgrading.

 

[Inner Child 77]

I also had no problems with my updates. But like other poeple here everyting I have is standard with no real configuration changes.

IC

 

[phatPhrog]

7.5.4 < 7.5.3

I updated 7.5.3 to 7.5.4 using updater with minimal problems until yesterday.

Ran updater for the latest, and afterward ran yum update to be sure all patches were installed.

This needed updating:

Updated: perl-HTML-Tree 1:3.16-fc2.build75050824.12.noarch

and since updating it, qmail just quits.

Watchdog sends me emails reflecting qmail failures.

The only way I can get everything working again is to restart qmail, psa-spamassassin via SSH.

Whether part of the same problem or not, also receiving 3-8 defunct sessions of dccproc.

 

[Redah]

SW-Soft's products do get tested enough. Ofcourse there will be problems, but, let's not forget:

There are thousands (yes, thousands) of Plesk users. But you never see people posting here, saying "My upgrade went great!". And why should they? For me, personally, I've had no problem upgrading 4 servers from 7.5.2 and 7.5.3 to 7.5.4. Everything went smooth.

The few people you see here with complaints do not make the majority of people. If everyone would post if their installation/upgrade failed or succeeded, my bet is you would see way more 'success' stories than 'failure' stories.

 

[phatPhrog]

Not Complaining

No complaints from me.

Just a few questions on different errors I'm having.

The updater is the best ever and not only does what it was written to do, but does so better than any other option available.

My upgrade not only went smooth, but using the migration manager was accomplished with such ease, I was unsure I'd actually changed servers it went to fast.

None of my clients were ever aware of the change!

Big Kudos to SW-Soft.

 

[Redah]

Re: Not Complaining

Originally posted by phatPhrog
No complaints from me.

If this was a reaction to my post... my post was a reaction to joelmoss's first post in this thread

 

[Traged1]

Well I have a few issues.

We are certified RHCE and MSCE engineers and we know how to work on our OS's fine.

When the OS and server is working fine without issues, and you execute a PLESK autoupdate from within the PLESK CP and after the process is completed and it reports a complete success, then you notice that there are major issue like apache seg faulting, errors in the PLESK database, and not being able to enable/disable frontpage support when an application from the application vault is installed to that respected domain, then I can safely say for sure that the PLESK update mangle things or there is bugs in the version of PLESK 7.5.4 for RHEL.

The right to complain is given, becuase we are trusting the smooth operation of our business which some of us have sacrificed our whole life to build. For many of us, hosting is our lives, not just a job. So when things go wronge and customers are calling you expecting answers and you have none to give because of the update, then you lose customer confidence. And that is dextrimental to our business.

We have been using PLESK since version 2 and while I still believe that it is the worlds most robust and secure CP, I can honestly say that I have never had even one completely smooth upgrade to date.

Most of the issues have been small, and easy to fix, even by just searching this very forum for answers.

However, the latest batch of problems has really gotten us into trouble with our customers.

SW-Soft please address the frontpage issue I have mentioned above and in my other posts and in the bug repost I sent to bugreports[at]sw-soft.com as it has all our customers who use the application vault not able to use frontpage currently.

 

[Redah]

Originally posted by Traged1
We are certified RHCE and MSCE engineers and we know how to work on our OS's fine.

When the OS and server is working fine without issues, and you execute a PLESK autoupdate from within the PLESK CP

Not to be a total *** or anything, but I actually just been reading up on a [different] forum about the value of IT certificates such as MSCE.

If you own such a certificate, I would assume that you would have manually downloaded the RPM's from shell, pick the ones you wanted to use, and update them, so you actually see on your screen what is happening. After testing it on a offline server mirror ofcourse, or in a Virtual Machine even.

However, you wouldn't put your faith into a one-click solution from a webserver GUI. I'm not saying that this caused your problems, not at all. But saying "we have certificates" and then in the line afterwards saying "I clicked the button and it went boom" wouldn't give me, personally, much faith in your abilities.

Ofcourse, this should go well, as SW-Soft proclaims, but it's not the path I would choose, and, possibly, the manual upgrade could have saved you some headaches in finding out the problems.

 

[Traged1]

Yes I totally agree with you, but to prove the point that it is not the operator's/admin's lack of knowledge that leads to the issues with PLESK updater. If the updater does not work properly why have it on the CP?

We always upgrade via RPM, instead of the updater however, givin our work load recently we have used the updater the past few time as we have poorly miss-judged the effectiveness of this tool.

So you have a button on the CP, which most user's believe is buggy, and then when you use it, and things break, people say you don't know how to work with the operating system? It is not the user's fault. We do realise that no piece of software is ever bug free even upon release, but the operations of the main program should be bug free enough to the point where it does not effect the overall operation of the software, even more so when the software is critical to the operation of your customer's livelyhood.

 

[Traged1]

Infact we were tailing the update processes via SSH and there appeared to be absolutely no issues with regards to the upgrade process itself.

Unfortunetly this would have been the same exact thing if I was using RPM and watching it via tty.

The problems are with the actual code in the reconfiguration scripts which plesk executes after the RPM installs. It does not properly check for locations and permissions and it does not provide any triggers when these unknown issues arise, therefor you are left guessing and researching for days exactly what was changed and the causes behind the new behavior.

 

[firepages]

Originally posted by Whistler
Also should be mentioned (and I don't mean to patronize anyone) - many many problems here is not because of buggy software - but a symptom of Plesk being used by and sold to people who don't know how to work their OS.

hmmm if I thought I knew everything and was a true *nix admin I would not need the benefits of a ready-made solution like plesk/etc etc would I ?

the vast majority of plesk users will be nowhere near sys-admins , thats the customer base.

I just upgraded to 7.5.4 on a Virtuozzo and the migration failed with no rollback.

I currently have a 1/2 working server , yes the GUI is faster but any changes made anywhere rewrite my httpd.include & psa.conf making virtual hosting and email useless, I dont have webmail & the migration manager is missing altogether.

I have just been informed by my host that 7.5.4 should not be used on virtuozzo ... if thats the case why was there an option in the migration manager to upgrade to 7.5.4 ... and why oh why did I use it

Surely this is a **** up by any ones measure ?