Installing Plesk

This tutorial outlines how to install a basic Plesk installation and was done on a fresh Cent OS 5 Rackspace Cloud Server build. I believe that Plesk is free for one domain. Should you wish to host more domains or provide reseller account you will have to purchase a copy of the software from Plesk’s store -http://www.parallels.com/store/plesk/linux. Details may vary from this tutorial depending on the system setup you are installing to.

Open up some ports
yum -y install traceroute jwhois tcpdump mtr bind-utils perl mlocate #install some useful bits
updatedb #update the locate db
yum update #update the system 

Open up some ports
/sbin/iptables -I INPUT 1 -p tcp –dport 80 -j ACCEPT #http port
/sbin/iptables -I INPUT 1 -p tcp –dport 443 -j ACCEPT #https port
/sbin/iptables -I INPUT 1 -p tcp –dport 3306 -j ACCEPT #mysql port
/sbin/iptables -I INPUT 1 -p tcp –dport 8443 -j ACCEPT #plesk port
/sbin/service iptables save #save 

Begin the install of Plesk
wget -q -O – http://www.atomicorp.com/installers/plesk |sh # grab the installer
yum -y install psa* #begin the install

Install as you wish, you will be ask a number of questions with a number of options, these greatly depend on what you want to do with the server.  A typical installation will have you up and running as a web server but have a look at the custom options first as it may be useful to you.

https://184.106.216.169:8443/ – Vist the site of the new install with the usernameadmin and the password setup

At this point you will again be guided through a wizard where Plesk with gather your details.  It’s fairly simple but if you run into any issues, post a comment and I shall see if i can lend a hand.  After your install you are free to configure your domains, mail accounts and other aspects of you server, demos and tutorials can be found here, http://www.parallels.com/products/plesk/demo/.  However, I have to upgrade my version of PHP as I believe Plesk installs an outdated version.  You can check this by going to command line and typing php -v, or creating a php file on your server with the code  inside and navigating to it via a browser.

 Upgrade PHP (5.2)
wget -q -O http://atomicorp.com/installers/atomic |sh #grab the repository need – change if php 5.3 required
yum upgrade php
mv /etc/php.ini /etc/php.ini1 #backup the php.ini
mv /etc/php.ini.rpmnew /etc/php.ini #move in the new php.ini for the new version that has been installed 

Start web services
/etc/init.d/psa stopall
/etc/init.d/psa startall
/etc/init.d/psa restart 

Secure the server by changing the password.
passwd root #change root password 

Additional notes:
/etc/init.d/psa start - stop plesk
/etc/init.d/psa stop - stop plesk
cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow - recover plesk password