Plesk 9 installation fails: user with UID=110 exists

[luka]

so after installing Ubuntu 8.04 AMD 64bit(and nothing else)
i tried to install plesk...it failed
fixed the /etc/hosts because i thought that might be the problem...
seconds attempt fails and so does every other
the only real error i can see is this:
ERROR: It seems there is a user with UID=110

in this system, but Plesk needs the same UID
for its operation.
Unfortunately, this situation has not yet been
resolved.
Please, visit http://www.parallels.com/support for assistance.

Exiting...
That seems to be the uid of the polkituser...which is added by the default installation and also has permissions set all over the filesystem.
So i can't just change that UID
any ideas on how to fix this?

 

[steogede]

On my CentOS 5 system uid 110 is 'popuser' - which presumably what Plesk needs it for (though it could be different in the Ubuntu version of Plesk)

It is possible to change the uid of a user, however there are a number of steps involved and you will need to know a uid that doesn't conflict with plesk (plus it will probably need to be a uid less than 1000).

There is a fare bit that could go wrong doing this if you mistype a command, so I wouldn't recommend doing so unless you have fully read and understood the instructions, feel confident and most importantly have taken backups.

The basic steps would be finding all the files owned by uid in question (this can be done with the 'find' command), chown-ing them to a new uid, editing '/etc/passwd', and possibly editing any files configuration files that need to know the uid of the user in question. It is problably best if you don't this on a running system - use something like SystemRescueCD or your hosting providers recovery system if you can. There is what appears to be a good guide at http://wiki.eeeuser.com/change_user_uid - however I haven't followed this guide, but from glancing through it it all seems to be present and correct.

Finally, I don't know why Plesk requires a hardcoded uid - surely it would be simpler to rely on the user name, then all they would have to do is parse /etc/passwd to get the uid they needed. Your best option is probably to report this bug to Parallels and wait for them to fix it.

 

[luka]

yes that seems to have done it...in fact i had to restart the installation for every service because it keps increasing their UIDs and UID 110 always ended up being taken by the next service.
after it tried to install the last user for god knows which service...and i changed 110 to something else the installation went through.
they should definetly stop using hard coded UIDs.This was a default installation of ubuntu 8.04.
I can't imagine how they tested this and put it under "supported" OS section...

 

[Michael OBrien]

Just wondering if anyone knows of a supported/recommended workaround for this bug.

What UID did you end up using luka for the service who's uid you changed?

 

[luka]

hmmm

this could be due to the fact that policy kit is installed by default on ubuntu.maybe if you remove it from the get go this problem doesn't happen since that UID is probably available.
But what i did was change the UID of policy kit and the permissions for that user on the system and then gave the service the UID it wanted(in plesk)...because plesk setup just dies if that UID is not available.So first try removing policy kit and if the problem still exists...just change the UID of the user/group that is causing the problem and rerun the setup until it gets all the UIDS and GUIDs it wants...
took some time but worked for me

 

[Michael OBrien]

Ya I considered removing policykit but decided against it. Is it safe to pick any unused 3 digit number for poliykit's new uid?

 

[luka]

yes

as far as i saw there was no problem with using a new uid...just make sure to change the permissions on the filesystem before you do that.policykit user owns 2 or 3 files somewhere on the system.Worked just fine after that(i know because most of the plesk stuff was being blocked by the default policies).
I removed it after that because i didn't really have the time to set the permissions for all plesk applications...

 

[Michael OBrien]

It gets better... I changed passwd so that UID 110 was free for plesk to use and then plesk installer itself goes ahead and assignes it to mysql AS PART OF THE INSTALL before throwing an error when it tries to re-use the same UID for popuser

I've attached the terminal window output

Lines 170 - 175 is where it starts installing mysql
Lines 207 - 217 is where UID 110 error crops up


Please please help me before I loose my mind

 

[luka]

yes

and this is why i had to change the passwd and group file a few times with each install.
for some strange reason i think the install just expects some UIDs to be free yet screws up when setting them for other services...
maybe it's just increasing them and messing things up.
anyway every time that happened i just opened the passwd and group files....fixed the UIDS to something else(and set the appropriate permissions on the filesystem before that)
and repeated the install.
had to do it about 5-10 times

 

[Michael OBrien]

I decided to go back a step and install 8.6 instead, thanks for all your help