Plesk 11 to VM – Part 1: Why move?

Intro

In this series of Best Practice articles I talk about migrating websites and emails from a Plesk 11 run server to a Virtualmin run server. It describes in details the steps involved, including the eventual pitfalls and other thing I came across whilst doing it. Note that this documentation is addressed to people with medium expertise in linux/system administration.

Fed up with Plesk?

Since 2003 I have been using two brands of Dedicated Servers Control Panels: Ensim (RIP) and Plesk. So it’s died 🙁 oh well, Ensim was an awful CP, never liked it, I liked Plesk (from 8 to 11) a bit more and it has been my selected Control Panel for many years. However the time has come to make way for a relatively new comer: Virtualmin or VM for short, a very mature and simpler CP indeed with a vibrant Community.

Deciding to select another Control Panel is a big decision, especially when your bottom line is at stake, so after having extensively tested and used VM for the last few months I finally decided to make the move, VM is slick, simple and easy to use, it’s like Ronseal, it does what it says on the tin.

Continue reading Plesk 11 to VM – Part 1: Why move?

Plesk 11 to VM – Part 2: Bare server set up

Intro

In this series of best practice articles I talk about migrating websites and emails from a Plesk 11 managed server to a Virtualmin managed server. It describes in some details the steps involved in doing it remedy the pitfalls and other things I came across whilst doing it. Note that this documentation is address to people with medium expertise in linux/system administration.

Hardware

A fresh install of a super fast multi-core web server with sufficient RAM and [Hardware] RAID 1 partitioned as follow: Continue reading Plesk 11 to VM – Part 2: Bare server set up

Reverting to passworded SSH (root) logins

My normal ssh logins are with public keys authentication (aka passwordless), however, under certain circumstances I’d like to revert back to good old passwords logins. Like when I want to transfer a Plesk server across another server using the Plesk Migration & Transfer manager.

After scouring the Net for some inspiration, which failed, and some tinkering, I finally found a neat solution to switch between the two (passwordless and normal authentication logins) quickly, the process is relatively simple* but frankly puzzling IMHO. I shall explain why: Continue reading Reverting to passworded SSH (root) logins

Yum clamav upgrade broken on virtualmin VPS

I got a vps with virtualmin installed, I recently upgraded clam antivirus using webmin/virtualmin, this resulted in the clamd failing to start.

After some research it turns out that I am running clamd with user clam instead of clamav. Yet yum upgrades clam with the user clamav and other directories in the configuration;

In short here is what I experienced after the upgrade (these must be changed back into the /etc/clamd.conf file): Continue reading Yum clamav upgrade broken on virtualmin VPS