Support for Ubuntu 14.10

[trialotto]

Are there options to support Ubuntu 14.10?

In essence, Ubuntu 14.04.01 LTS (as supported now) is not that different from Ubuntu 14.10.

An installation of plesk should be without problems, if 14.10 is being used.

The current binary file parallels_installer prevents installation and that is not necessary.

Can you reply and/or suggest a workaround?

 

[IgorG]

Sorry, but we support only LTS versions of Ubuntu. 14.10 is not LTS.

 

[trialotto]

@IgorG,

That is known to me, but there is not really a difference in packages for 14.04 and 14.10 (at least packages needed by Plesk).

The only problem is that the installer is a (not changeable) binary.

I am pretty sure that a simple change (one line) in the binary will allow installation on 14.10, being a proper installation.

Therefore, the question is why there should not be support for 14.10, since a proper installation of Plesk can be done on that Ubuntu version.

By the way, if I have the time (somewhere in the next couple of months), I will try to make the hack and test-install Plesk on Ubuntu 14.10.

I hope we can tackle that test-install together....

Kind regards..

 

[IgorG]

It is our policy. We support only LTS even if support of non-LTS Ubuntu release will cost us nothing.

 

[trialotto]

@IgorG,

All due respect for this policy, but note the following.

Many Plesk installations on Ubuntu are on a VPS and/or a cloud server, with cloud-init being the underlying technology for initializing the VM (or VPS).

The Ubuntu (Trusty) 14.04.1 LTS version has an outdated cloud-init version (0.7.5) and, moreover, some other virtualization bugs reside in Trusty.

In Ubuntu (Utopic) 14.10, many of these bugs have resolved, in the Ubuntu system itself and a new version of cloud-init (0.7.6).

In short, the policy of Parallels (even though very understandable and reasonable) is (indirectly) yielding customer dissatisfaction, in the form of issues encountered.

In my opinion, Plesk customers can resolve issues by updating specific Trusty packages, to versions used by Utopic (that is no problem).

However, the average Plesk customers will not do so and/or think about resolution of issues that are related to the OS (and not Plesk), yielding customer dissatisfaction.

The answer to my question is clear.

In a sense, no dispute exists, but a conflict in viewpoints concerning the interests of Parallels, which are closely related to customer satisfaction.

It is my firm belief that the interests of Parallels would be better served, if Plesk customers would have more OS options.

After all, Plesk is a proper and solid product for specific OS-es and intended as a "worry free" hosting panel.

It should be the case that Parallels focuses on more (mainstream) OS-es and variants thereof, instead of exotic OS-es and/or OS-es that are in the end-of-life stage.

For instance, the CentOS support for Plesk proves that viewpoint, many issues are arising in the CentOS-based installations.

Anyway, all the above does not really matter, Parallels is free to make her own choices with respect to supported OS-es, I have no problem with that.

The question is whether this freedom results in strategic "wise" decisions.

Kind regards....

 

[IgorG]

@trialotto

As you remember we have supported a lot of different OSes some years ago - Fedora, FreeBSD and even OSX
The main problem in resources and reasonable efforts for support of this zoo of OSes.

BTW, Plesk installations on CentOS significantly, many times more than on Ubuntu. Therefore, it seems that the problems on CentOS more.

 

[trialotto]

@IgorG,

I can more or less remember the introduction of the expanded support of many (new) OS-es and, if I am not mistaken, this was an approach to counter cPanel or DirectAdmin.

However, the issues with Plesk on CentOS are not only limited to Plesk, these issues also occur with cPanel or DirectAdmin.

In a sense, your statement that the number of Plesk/Cent-OS installations is causing more reported issues should be correct, but one should not forget that most of the reported issues are not unique to Plesk, they also occur in other hosting panel installations and/or in the CentOS environment in general.

In our business, we have never used Fedora, FreeBSD and/or CentOS, but relied upon RedHat, Suse and primarily Ubuntu distributions, for the simple reason that the latter distributions are (also) supported by the open source community, with a specific party directing code development and controlling stable releases.

Personally, I can imagine that Parallels chooses to support CentOS, but I also feel that supporting this and other OS-es does create the need to assign a lot of (development) resources to bugfixes for those OS-es, while development should be focused primarily on the evolution of Plesk.

In a certain sense, a paradigm shift in Plesk development has occurred, by supporting the "zoo of OS-es".

And as a result, if we are honest, the support of specific OS-es also has opened up the "zoo of sysadmins" that are using those OS-es, with these sysadmins often not having the knowledge or capacity or resources to administer a hosting panel properly.

The above is often reflected in these forums, in which some questions are asked regarding issues, that (normally) cannot be replicated, unless a number of major mistakes has been made in system set-up and bare server configuration.

I am pretty certain that a vast number of Plesk/CentOS installations is not the primary reason for all those reported issues.

In the best case, it is a secondary or tertiary reason.

In short, the introduction of the integrity checker and/or repair tool could be a starting point to reduce the CentOS related errors, but I assume that it will not suffice.

In essence, I do not understand why sysadmins are not trying a new OS, if an old OS with Plesk fails everytime and they waste days in resolving problems.

Kind regards....