Bad Request (Invalid Hostname) when accessing via IP

Customer wanted to have a dedicated IP, but once I change the IP from the plesk control panel, I couldn’t get the website when accessed using IP. Instead, it was giving me the plesk control panel’s default page. Reason ? Default Website was having the IP as “All Unassigned”. Set that to the main IP address. But after that I was getting a new error.

What I could get was “Bad Request (Invalid Hostname)” in bold letters. Here is what I did to fix the same.

Start -> Run -> inetmgr -> Expand the (+) -> Websites -> Right click on the domain name -> Take Properties -> Website -> IP Address (make sure that it has the dedicated IP assigned there) and then click “Advanced”

Add/Edit Web Site Identification

IP Address : Choose the dedicated IP from drop down list
TCP/IP Port : 80
Host Header Value : Leave it blank (Important)

Leaving the Host Header Value should fix the issue and fetch the website when accessing it using the IP.

How to recover forgotten plesk password from a Linux or Windows Dedicated or VPS server

To Recover your plesk password on a Linux Dedicated or VPS Server

1. Login as root to the server using ssh
2. Then issue the command below, to see your plesk password cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow

To Recover your plesk password on a windows dedicated or VPS server

1. cd %plesk_bin%
2. Make sure that you ended up in a folder which is a line similar to “C:\Program Files\SWsoft\Plesk\admin\bin\” If not, you will have to do a “D:\” or so depending on which drive or disk you installed Plesk on and then issue the below command
3. plesksrvclient.exe -get

One website in Plesk is asking for user name and password. What is the solution

This is common issue, but solutions varies based on situations. It could be one or a combination of a solutions listed below. If you had to go through another solution to solve it, please add it over here for others.

• Permission issue was making the website to ask for the password. Run the Plesk permissions fix from the Plesk reconfigurator. It could help you 10% of the time
• If it is asking for username and password, right after you changed the password of the account, 80% of the cases, below command based solution would work.
  

  cd %plesk_bin%
  websrvmng –update-anon-password –domain-name=domainname.com

• Login to plesk, select the domain, click web directories. And there, select the the protection tab and click remove protection if enabled – Only 5% chances to have this solve your issue
• Try resetting the domain password from Plesk, with Additional Write/Modify permissions checked. This may sync the IUSR_username’s password and the Plesk/FTP password. If it didn’t move on to next option to manually synchronize it.
• Go to IIS > Web sites > domainname.com > Properties > Directory Security tab > Click on Edit button within “Authentication and access control” section > enter “password” in password filed > click OK.
  After that, Go to Users Management > find user IUSR_pleskusername > Right Click > set password > proceed > enter “password” > click OK. If this also didn’t fix, issue is much more serious and move on to next options
• Depending on the Plesk versions you use, Plesk group `psacln` should be allowed to access the server from the network. For that Go to, Administrative Tools > Security Settings > Local Polices > User Rights Assignment > Access this computer from the network
• Check whether there is any new FTP accounts added with the “Home directory” as httpdocs itself. If so please remove it and then change the password at Domain Setup and save it
• Check whether the plesk_username and IIS_pleskusername are added and has proper permissions for the DriveLetter:\Inetpub\vhosts\domainname.com as well as DriveLetter:\Inetpub\vhosts\domainname.com\httpdocs.

Okay those are my current solutions.

When trying to log in to Plesk horde, the login page reloads and does not log in into webmail.

Operating System was Linux

No one was able to login to Plesk’s default webmail, horde. Enabled error reporting in php.ini and got the error message as below in the “/etc/httpd/logs/error_log” and/or “/var/log/psa-horde/psa-horde.log”

PHP Warning: Unknown(): Failed to write session data (files). Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct (/usr/local/psa/admin/sessions) in Unknown on line 0, referer: http://webmail.supportsages.com/test.php?mode=unregister

Here the solution was to edit the php.ini to use /tmp as the session.save_path or even “/var/lib/php/session”

Other solution, for similar issue (not this exact error though) is to set,

session.auto_start = 0 in php.ini
Making sure that localhost entry is in /etc/hosts and resolves. For that do a telnet localhost 143 and if you get “Connected to” message, its not that issue check /etc/hosts file. It must have permissions -rw-r–r– (644) on a ls -l
Whatever be the session.save_path setting in the php.ini, it should have the permission of 1777
Run IMP test to check the problem at: http://webmail.DOMAIN.COM/horde/imp/test.php and make sure that you get the green words for all the tests.
This problem may occur if the domain’s web content is hosted on another server and the MX DNS record doesn’t exist or points not to the Plesk server. IMP tries to check mail on whatever server the domain name resolves to. In order to prevent this from happening the domain name or MX record (if it exists) must be resolved locally to the server.

References : http://kb.parallels.com/article_41_260_en.html

Plesk : Unable to send or receive emails to users in the domain hosted in the server

Customers were not receiving any emails or unable to send email to users in the domain hosted in the server.

Log was saying

Server Error: 421 fopen(‘users/assign’) failed (#5.7.10) Permission denied.

As the log says, it is permission or ownership issue with the folder. We could have reset that file alone, but almost all the ownerships & permissions were messed up. So the first step was to use the mchk utility. Issued /usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/mchk –with-spam

But that didn’t fix the issue and we had to force the reinstallation/upgrade of psa-qmail package available as an rpm. Reinstalled and mail started working.

Parallels KB is improving day by day and even better than cPanel documentation. Refer http://kb.parallels.com/en/944 for more details on mchk.exe usage.