SuSE

I've tried moving a Plesk 8.6 installation on SuSE 10.0 to a Plesk 8.6 installation on SuSE 10.3, but this doesn't work (see https://kis.hosteurope.de/support/faq/index.php?cpid=13913 (requires login)).

Downgrading to openssh-4.1p1-10 allows Plesk Migration Manager to work, and to avoid opening up vulnerabilities I've used...

/etc/hosts.deny:
sshd : ALL : DENY

and

/etc/hosts.allow:
sshd : xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx : ALLOW

In this blog entry I'll collect a few minor items where I feel, that Plesk is not quite up where it should be.

Before Anything Else: Fix SSH

Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and make the following changes (in the order of the parameters in the file):

Drupal requires http://example.com/cron.php being called regularly. You can set this up in Plesk within each site. Plesk will create a corresponding entry in /var/spool/cron/tabs/site_user. The downside of this is that each cron run will produce an entry in the /var/log/messages system log. If you have a couple of sites and each one runs the cron job every hour, then you'll easily end up with hundreds of useless system log entries every day!

Do you hate redundancy? So do I! Rather than installing and maintaining Drupal and its modules separately for each virtual host, it's much better to install it once and link each domain to the shared copy. Of course, we still want to maintain high security. This blog entry will walk you through installing Drupal 5.1 on a SuSE 10.0 box.

Let's get right to it:

groupadd drupal
groupmod drupal -A wwwrun
groupmod drupal -A psaftp
groupmod drupal -A psaadm

Create a temporary directory for file uploads:

I would like to host multiple domains and subdomains on my server and be able to use SSL encryption with some of them. Typically, you need to have one certificate for each domain, and you can only have one certificate per IP address, because the SSL protocol is negotiated based on the IP address before the browser sends the host name.

There are a number of issues that need to be fixed/acknowledged before the VPS will run well.