Is this statement true regarding Plesk???

[ThankYouAndMe]

My hosting provider told me this when I told them I want to have 'Up2date' access on my VPS account. Is this statement ture???

This is in response to your customer service inquiry regarding Web Hosting.

We have researched the issues you raised in your inquiry and have determined the following:
that Up2date will modify the core of plesk and will cause server to cease and could lead to repro I suggest to update each of the package.

 

[jemenake]

Search the forums and you will find posts where up2date (or some other non-plesk update utility) has broken some of the Plesk packages.

The one that happened to me was that it caused the webmail to all be displayed in Arabic. Search the forums for "Arabic" and you'll see.

- Joe

 

[ThankYouAndMe]

You are right... I did find many problems. But, then how are we suppose to keep the server patched as far as security is concerned?

 

[jemenake]

My general impression is that Plesk isn't aimed at providing you with a secure server. It's aimed at providing you with a pretty interface so that you can fire your IT staff.

If you want security, delete Plesk and configure your server the normal way.

It sounds smug... but I don't know what else to tell you. In some cases, it's not really their fault, since newer packages might have different API's from the ones they wrote their PHP scripts for. In other cases, it is their fault for deciding to use a PHP-obfuscator so that you can't tweak their code to work with newer packages.

- Joe

 

[jamesyeeoc]

Whether you use Up2date, manual updating, or yum, there is always the possibility of updating some package which will not be compatible with some other package. Plesk is just another package on the system which has dependencies on other packages.

 

[ThankYouAndMe]

So how do you guys keep your server patched and secure?

 

[jamesyeeoc]

Personally I do NOT use Up2date. I had major problems with it once and never went back.

I use yum with ART's repository. When a security issue comes to light, I wait until ART makes the Plesk /OS compatible RPMs available and then I use his.

This has saved me hundreds of hours in just the last year, when compared to before times.

The admins who usually end up with the most problems are the ones who try to manually update from other sources (IMO). Like trying to make Plesk work with PHP5...

 

[GARMTECH]

It's issue with VPS Plesk.

When you do up2date in VPS all packages will be updated locally "from new" and you will loose links with shared libraries on VPS hardware node that will break one of VPS ideas - minimizing disk usage and use of shared libs.

Better ask your VPS provider to update Plesk from packages provided by SW-Soft for Virtuozzo. Latest release version in VPS Plesk packages for Fedora Core 1 & 2 is 7.5.2.

...in our configurations up2date button is removed from default plesk installation.

 

[ThankYouAndMe]

Originally posted by jamesyeeoc
Personally I do NOT use Up2date. I had major problems with it once and never went back.

I use yum with ART's repository. When a security issue comes to light, I wait until ART makes the Plesk /OS compatible RPMs available and then I use his.

This has saved me hundreds of hours in just the last year, when compared to before times.

The admins who usually end up with the most problems are the ones who try to manually update from other sources (IMO). Like trying to make Plesk work with PHP5...

How and Where can I get "yum" with "ART's" repository?

 

[eWebtricity]

http://www.atomicrocketturtle.com/

 

[atomicturtle]

What I suggest people do, is put together a test environment for their server in vmware, or on another system that they can afford to break. That way you can run up2date, yum, manual updates, and verify that things dont break.

When you do verify that something breaks your install (pretty rare, but things like Mysql 4.1, or a kernel update for example) you can exclude them from yum with:

exclude=kernel*,mysql*

Hope this helps!

 

[ehabheikal]

Virtuozzo only issue

This is a virtuozzo only issue, if you have a dedicated server with plesk without virtouzzo then you can easily use up2date or yum to upgrade.
This is the main reason I did not use virtuozzo and instead use freevps.com or linux-vserver.org both give similar virtuozzo like vps with much more flexibility to the end vps admin.
Get a cheap dedicated server, or a reseller account. Virtouzzo is only cool if you do not care about security.