Sometimes you need to rebuild all your httpd.include files, it can be done with websrvmng command:
/usr/local/psa/admin/bin/websrvmng -av
Plesk rebuild Apache configuration files
January 4th, 2009 — Linux, Plesk
Howto enable antivirus for all accounts in Plesk
October 24th, 2008 — Linux, Plesk
To enable AntiVirus for all accounts in Plesk you can use the following script:
#!/bin/bash mysql -uadmin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` psa<<-EOT UPDATE mail SET virusfilter = 'any' WHERE postbox = 'true' AND virusfilter != 'any' EOT
You can run it daily from the cron to keep your mailboxes protected.
Plesk password recovery
August 25th, 2008 — Linux, Plesk
If you forgot your admin password in Plesk, you’ll need to connect to your server with ssh and you can find the password in the file /etc/psa/.psa.shadow .
[root@apollo ~]# cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow <admin_pass>
To find mailbox’s password in Plesk, connect to your server with ssh, then use the following SQL query to reveal mailbox password (replace MAILBOX_NAME with your mailbox name):
[root@apollo ~]# mysql -u admin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` psa [...] mysql> SELECT m.mail_name, d.name, a.password FROM mail AS m LEFT JOIN (domains AS d, accounts AS a) \ ON (m.dom_id = d.id AND m.account_id = a.id) WHERE m.mail_name='MAILBOX_NAME'
Plesk - Howto debug spam problems
July 22nd, 2008 — Linux, Plesk
Today I’ve received an alert from the monitoring system, the mails count from server’s queue was too high.
Depending on the numbers of the clients hosted on the server more than 500 of mails lasting more than half hour in the queue is meaning that someone has sent a newsletter or spam.
Let’s ssh there and study the problem. Firstly we should look at the server’s queue:
[root@ulise ~]# /var/qmail/bin/qmail-qstat messages in queue: 758 messages in queue but not yet preprocessed: 0
We do have 758 mails in the queue. Let’s examine the queue with qmail-qread. Seeing a bunch of strange email addresses in the recipient list usually it’s meaning spam.
[root@ulise ~]# /var/qmail/bin/qmail-qread [...]
You can examine the email content of the emails in the queue using Plesk interface or just less command. Firstly we should find message’s id using qmail-qread, then find the file holding the email in /var/qmail/queue with find command.
[root@ulise ~]# /var/qmail/bin/qmail-qread [...] 18 Jul 2008 02:01:11 GMT #22094026 1552 <> remote user@yahoo.com [...] [root@ulise ~]# find /var/qmail/queue/ -name 22094026 /var/qmail/queue/mess/19/22094026 /var/qmail/queue/remote/19/22094026 /var/qmail/queue/info/19/22094026 [root@ulise ~]# less /var/qmail/queue/mess/19/22094026 Received: (qmail 10728 invoked from network); 22 Jul 2008 19:40:46 +0300 Received: from unknown (HELO User) (86.107.221.138) by domain.com with SMTP; 22 Jul 2008 19:40:46 +0300 Reply-To: <support@PayPal.Inc.com> From: "PayPal"<support@PayPal.Inc.com> Subject: Dispute Transaction Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:40:52 +0300 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/html; charset="Windows-1251" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 1 X-MSMail-Priority: High X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000 [...]
Oops, we do have some spam in the queue that’s received from the network (IP: 86.107.221.138). We should remove spam from the queue or the server IP address will finish listed in the RBLs, qmail-remove is the right tool for this job.
Check the number of the spams with the spam pattern (”PayPal.Inc.com” in this case):
[root@ulise ~]# qmail-remove -p 'PayPal.Inc.com'
Now, remove spams (notice the ‘-r’ switch), they all will end up in the /var/qmail/queue/yanked directory. Don’t forget to stop qmail daemon before (/etc/init.d/qmail stop) :
[root@ulise ~]# qmail-remove -r -p 'PayPal.Inc.com'
In a few minutes we do have more emails with the same patterns from the same ip address. That’s great, we do have opportunity to examine smtp traffic from the spammer’s ip address. Run tcpdump and wait a few minutes.
[root@ulise ~]# tcpdump -i eth0 -n src 86.107.221.138 \or dst 86.107.221.138 -w smtp.tcpdump -s 2048
Examining log file with less or wireshark we found that spammer is sending spam using LOGIN authentication:
220 ulise.domain.com ESMTP ehlo User 250-ulise.domain.com 250-AUTH=LOGIN CRAM-MD5 PLAIN 250-AUTH LOGIN CRAM-MD5 PLAIN 250-STARTTLS 250-PIPELINING 250 8BITMIME AUTH LOGIN 334 VXNlcm5hbWU6 dGVzdA== 334 UGFzc3dvcmQ6 MTIzNDU= 235 go ahead
Interesting, let’s decode the user/pass to see which account is used:
[root@ulise ~]# perl -MMIME::Base64 -e 'print decode_base64("dGVzdA==")' test [root@ulise ~]# perl -MMIME::Base64 -e 'print decode_base64("MTIzNDU=")' 12345
So, someone created a test account with a weak password and someone else guessed it and is sending spam through the server.
Let’s find the domain owning of the mailbox:
[root@ulise ~]# mysql -uadmin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` psa [...] mysql> SELECT m.mail_name, d.name, a.password FROM mail AS m LEFT JOIN (domains AS d, accounts AS a) ON (m.dom_id = d.id AND m.account_id = a.id) WHERE m.mail_name='test' AND a.password='12345'; +-----------+------------+----------+ | mail_name | name | password | +-----------+------------+----------+ | test | example.com | 12345 | +-----------+------------+----------+ 1 row in set (0.01 sec)
Next step is to delete test mailbox and send a warning to client.
To improve your server’s security you’ll need to enable:
Server -> Mail -> Check the passwords for mailboxes in the dictionary
Creating a mailbox “test” with password “12345″ is a stupid thing and spammers just love to exploit it.
Plesk 8.3.0 extract files from backup
July 17th, 2008 — Linux, Plesk
Extracting files from a Plesk 8.3 backup it’s not an easy task and it’s time consuming.
Let’s examine backup file:
[root@monster ~]# file plesk_bigserver_2008-07-10.backup plesk_bigserver_2008-07-10.backup: ASCII English text, with very long lines
Plesk backup is a multi-part mime-encoded file, you can easy restore one domain or whole server using plesk backup utilities, but when you need a few files from backup you’ll need an external tool like ripemime or mpack.
Requirements:
- Free disk space minimum 2*backup_file_size
- mpack tool
Check your free space using df(disk free) command.
[root@monster ~]# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hda3 9.2G 2.5G 6.3G 29% / /dev/hda1 190M 15M 166M 8% /boot none 1010M 0 1010M 0% /dev/shm /dev/hda7 53G 17G 34G 34% /home /dev/hda6 950M 17M 886M 2% /tmp /dev/hda5 46G 7.2G 37G 17% /var
Let’s install mpack. On a Redhat/Fedora/CentOS system it’s easy, just subscribe to Dag Wieers’s repository. You’ll need to download rpmforge-release rpm that’s matching your server OS and architecture:
For CentOS 5 and x86_64 architecture we’ll use rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm:
[root@monster tmp]# wget http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm [...] [root@monster tmp]# rpm -ivh rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm [...] [root@monster tmp]# yum install mpack [...]
Let’s make a directory where we’ll extract backup files and then extract files there:
[root@monster ~]# mkdir recover [root@monster ~]# cd recover [root@monster ~]# munpack < ../plesk_bigserver_2008-07-15.backup [...]
Mpack will extract files into separate tar archives where you can locate the domain by archive name and extract files using tar command.