Running Windows Plesk control panel on additional port 443.

One of our windows server required plesk to run on dedicated ip on port 443 because of ISP restriction as they only allowed access to port 443 and 80. By default Plesk Control Panel Web site in IIS is configured to listen on port 8443 on all IP addresses. A dedicated IP address needs to be used for Plesk Plesk Control Panel and none of domains hosted on the server for that ip.  This is required to avoid conflicts with existing websites

The following needs to be done:

1. Go to IIS management console

2. Find PleskControlPanel web site

3. Click on Properties

4. Click on Advanced button in Web Site tab

5. Add SSL identity for the Web Site

6. Set IP address that you want to use and set SSL port to 443

7. Apply

Then edit Apache configuration file %plesk_dir%admin\conf\httpd.conf.

1. Find the line

Listen 8443

2. Add the following line below that

Listen IP_address:443

Retsart Plesk Control Panel service using tray monitor.

Website prompting for username and password – Plesk 9.2 Windows 2008

Many times when you create a website from Plesk it works fine initially but suddenly one day you get a username and password prompt on your website which is very frustating and annoying.  We have been gone through such issues quite enough so here is what you need to do.

1.) Check permissions for the domain. Open Plesk panel – Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation panel. Select the check box corresponding to the domain name you want to perform permissions check on. Click Check permissions.

2.) Delete file .Security from the domain directory: ( Basically under yourdomain.com folder )

%plesk_vhosts%\domain.tld

3.) Reconfigure the domain settings:

“%plesk_bin%\websrvmng.exe” –reconfigure-vhost –vhost-name=yourdomain.com

4.) Reset the domains password from Plesk panel

Restart the website from the IIS , Well if the problem still persists you need to check the permissions from IIS , Make sure you have proper authentication setup for IUSR_Username and proper authentication for the domains application pool.

Switch BIND DNS Server 9.4.2-P1 to Microsoft DNS – Plesk

Recently we had an issue with Plesk Windows 08 running Bind as DNS service. The problem appears to be failed DNS service every 5 /10 mins on the server thus causing downtime.  With no clue in the event viewer and after doing a lot of research we decided to switch the DNS to microsoft DNS server to avoid this issue happening again. Here are the steps to switch the DNS.

Login into Plesk Panel as admin user.

Plesk >> Server >> Components Management >> (Click on the link “DNS Server”) >> (Select the ‘Microsoft DNS Server’ and click ‘Ok’).

The switching will be done automatically and the Plesk will create the necessary files almost instantaneously. So there won’t be any associated down time.

The above process automatically disables Plesk Bind from services and enabled Microsoft DNS server. However you can restart the DNS service from plesk and check.