Plesk Panel License no longer Auto Extends

[iRapture]

I am running a Plesk 10.4.4 server on Ubuntu and for the past several months it is not automatically extending it's expiration date. I can manually "Retrieve Keys" with no problems so I know the port is not being blocked. It seems the system is just not automatically retrieving the key updates anymore. I've never had to do this with any of our Plesk servers in the past (and don't have this problem on my other Plesk 10.4.4 server). How can I fix the automatic key retrieval or toggle it back on?

The problem seems to have started after migrating the VZ Container it is in from one Physical Server to another.

 

[figjam]

I've been having the same problem with tons of VPS customers running Plesk. Like you, there are no problems reaching the license server.

I've just realised that this is probably related to cron (more specifically anacron) being massively broken on CentOS/Debian & Ubuntu VPSs. Does anyone know if the automatic license update is run via cron?

If you aren't using anacron, remove it via the Virtuozzo Control Panel on port 4643. Basically /etc/crontab has entries like this for cron.daily, weekly and monthly:

54 4 * * * root test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily )

The problem is that Virtuozzo installs anacron in a very broken way in many of the OS EZ templates and because /usr/sbin/anacron exists the cron.daily, weekly and monthly entries do not get run. It's broken differently for each of the distributions. Let me know which OS template your VPS is running on and I can give you more specifics.

Cheers,


Andrew

 

[iRapture]

Using ubuntu-8.04-x86_64 OS template. I actually wondered if it might have anything to do with Cron.

 

[figjam]

Execute the following command from inside the VPS:

dpkg -L anacron | grep anacron

In the output you will find entries for the following files:

/etc/cron.d/anacron
/etc/cron.daily/0anacron
/etc/cron.weekly/0anacron
/etc/cron.monthly/0anacron

Those files do not exist in your VPS. You can start anacron via /etc/init.d/anacron start but it will exit and not run again because /etc/cron.d/anacron is missing and contains:

30 7 * * * root test -x /etc/init.d/anacron && /usr/sbin/invoke-rc.d anacron start >/dev/null


The easyanswer is to just remove anacron if you aren't using it (which is highly unlikely given that it will never have worked in this VPS). If you do want to use anacron, the easiest way to get it working is to execute the following commands:

apt-get purge anacron
apt-get update
apt-get install anacron


Either way, lots of things like logrotate will suddenly start working. I bet if you look at the domains in Plesk you will not currently have any statistics because they are generated from a job in cron.daily. Given the scale of the problem, I'm amazed at how long it's taken all of us (and our customers) to notice.

Cheers,


Andrew

 

[iRapture]

Thanks the reinstall of anacron fixed it. It immediately updated the license after reinstalling anacron. The peculiar part for us is that we didn't have any license problems with this same VPS on the old Physical Server.

 

[inado1]

I would like to say:

Don't RUN

apt-get purge anacron or
yum remove anacron

because it will also remove plesk panel packages as it is in its dependencies.

I would advise to check your Iptables records.

Check whether 8447,12443,11443 & 11444 PORTS OPEN for INPUT