Specific questions before I upgrade

[satch89450]

I'm currently running PSA 7.0.3 and 7.0.4 on Red Hat 7.3 and Red Hat 9.0 boxes. I've been looking at what it would take to rebuild my servers to Fedora Core 2 or 3 and Plesk 7.5.1 and migrate accounts.

1. What migration tools exist?

2. Has Plesk modified their RPMs and published a repository that is accessible and usable to Yum? (I know that atomicrocketturtle has done something like this.)

3. What resource management/control tools has Plesk added to PSA? Do Web Apps still take over the server? Can incoming mail make even 1-GB RAM systems start thrashing?

4. Has Plesk fixed their QMail/SpamAssassin problem, where they send mail through SpamAssassin first and *then* find out there's no room for mail in the receipent's mailbox?

5. How about the "delete-spam" option -- does that work now?

6. Is there any way for SMTP-authenticated sessions to bypass blocklisting checks?

7. Is there any marker as to which SMTP-authenticated user submitted mail to the system, in case they are spamming through their account?

8. Indeed, has Plesk provided for a mail agent other than QMail, such as Exim or PostFix?

9. Is phpsuexec supported?

10. What spam tracing tools does Plesk provide with their bundled QMail?

11. Outbound mail rate limiting from Web sites?

12. Serialization of mail so that you don't have 30 connections to Yahoo at the same time, to the detriment of everyone else?

13. Plesk apparently bundles everything for a Web hosting appliance *except* Apache and PHP/Zend for Web sites. (They bundle PHP for thier own control panel.) Has Plesk isolated their changes in modules that conform to the Apache 2.0.x and 2.1.x API, so that any other modules supplied by Apache or any third party may be added and updated with impunity?

14. Has anyone successfully taken PSA 7.5.1 servers above the 300-domain mark in a commercial Web hosting environment?

The PHP 4.3.10 flap is making me consider this path.

 

[Cranky]

1. What migration tools exist?

psadump/psarestore backup utilities if you upgrade to 7.5.1 on the existing servers first, or transfer to 7.03/7.04 on destination servert then upgrade. Or there's the migration manager in 7.5/7.1 - but tha't supposedly unreliable depending on who you ask.

2. Has Plesk modified their RPMs and published a repository that is accessible and usable to Yum? (I know that atomicrocketturtle has done something like this.)

Well obviously plesk rpm's changed ... but I'm not sure exactly what you're asking.

3. What resource management/control tools has Plesk added to PSA? Do Web Apps still take over the server? Can incoming mail make even 1-GB RAM systems start thrashing?

There's nothing in particular to stop any of this.

4. Has Plesk fixed their QMail/SpamAssassin problem, where they send mail through SpamAssassin first and *then* find out there's no room for mail in the receipent's mailbox?

I'm unsure, but there's been a LOT of bugfixes since 7.03.

5. How about the "delete-spam" option -- does that work now?

Yes.

6. Is there any way for SMTP-authenticated sessions to bypass blocklisting checks?

Nope - if you mean can someone listed in an RBL still send mail via your SMTP.

7. Is there any marker as to which SMTP-authenticated user submitted mail to the system, in case they are spamming through their account?

This is no different to older versions.

8. Indeed, has Plesk provided for a mail agent other than QMail, such as Exim or PostFix?

Not yet.

9. Is phpsuexec supported?

Not directly by Plesk, but I've heard of a few ppl using it.

10. What spam tracing tools does Plesk provide with their bundled QMail?

None, but you can use most standard qmail utilities.

11. Outbound mail rate limiting from Web sites?

Not on a per-domain basis.

12. Serialization of mail so that you don't have 30 connections to Yahoo at the same time, to the detriment of everyone else?

Same as 7.0.

13. Plesk apparently bundles everything for a Web hosting appliance *except* Apache and PHP/Zend for Web sites. (They bundle PHP for thier own control panel.) Has Plesk isolated their changes in modules that conform to the Apache 2.0.x and 2.1.x API, so that any other modules supplied by Apache or any third party may be added and updated with impunity?

Plesk admin server is completely independant from vhost apache so any changes to apache should work fine. It's not just httpd/php which aren't bundled though ... there's a lot of things such as bind.

14. Has anyone successfully taken PSA 7.5.1 servers above the 300-domain mark in a commercial Web hosting environment?

Yes, it depends entirely on your type of customers, usage per-domain, server spec, admin ability and much more though.

 

[satch89450]

On point 2, I was thinking specifically of Plesk having a yum repository, and modifying their RPMs to work properly from the respository, so that you don't have to do a multi-step operation to install an upgraded version of plesk.

Put another way:

a. Add Plesk repository information to my /etc/yum.conf file

b. type "yum update"

c. At the end. all is up to date and running.

 

[Cranky]

Ah, no that's not possible from Plesk ... but ART's should work just fine.

 

[satch89450]

It didn't. I think that may well be due to the problems in PHP 4.3.10 that have already been reported to that group.

"Circular dependencies" was the diagnostic I got when I tried ART's stuff.

Blown-up servers is what I got when I installed the RPMs manually (and there was no replacement php-manual, which broke dependencies anyway).

Blown-up server is what I got when I build a Red Hat 9 from scratch, and tried to install PHP 4.3.10 from source tarball. PSA wasn't in the picture.

So instead I write yet another log file scanner...