I love administrating servers but when it comes to fulfilling my clients need I wish I had some magic software that could help me manage the server resources and everything. Well my iPhone does this … nah I’m just kidding obviusly Plesk is the way to go since thats the title of this post.

When I found what was Plesk capable off I was amazed because it offers alot of features that can help you automate your bussiness however there is one thing that I don’t like about it: “Plesk documentation sucks” literally. And i’m sure you agree with me and that’s probably why you are here.

When I wanted to install plesk I started by choosing an OS for it, so I chosed Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS because I’ve been seen all this Ubuntu hype and I wanted to give it a try so here’s my log of what happened.

First I downloaded the whole Plesk installer but really quick I found this useless since it was a bunch of .deb packages that had no instructions on which order I should follow to install it.

Second I downloaded the plesk auto installer but oh surprise it didn’t work either, the problem was I havn’t installed MySQL 5 first. Here I tryed with a simple apt-get but that didn’t work so I had to install first the sources I needed and then update apt-get repo and finally try to install MySQL 5.1 so here’s what you should try first

On your terminal using your favorite editor edit this file and add the following lines:
#nano /etc/apt/sources.list

and at the very bottom add
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/monty/ubuntu gutsy main universe restricted multiverse
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/smurf/ubuntu gutsy main universe restricted multiverse

Press Ctrl-X and Y enter to save and exit

Do both updating and upgrading to make sure apt-get works as it should
#apt-get update
#apt-get upgrade

Get mysql
#apt-get install mysql-server-5.1

If you happend to have troubles at this step try

#apt-get -f install

which should force the instalation of whatever else is needed and finish the installtion

After that browse to where you downloaded your Plesk auto installer , for example I saved my auto intalled to /home/perrohunter/parallels_installer_v3.4.1_build090120.13_os_Ubuntu_8.04_i386

So first add it execution permissions:

#chmod +x parallels_installer_v3.4.1_build090120.13_os_Ubuntu_8.04_i386

and now if you want everything to go smooth for you try installing Plesk using it’s web interface

#./parallels_installer_v3.4.1_build090120.13_os_Ubuntu_8.04_i386 –web-interface

this will prompt you to open your server hostname at the port 8447 on any browser, I had some problems using the hostname so I used the IP

htt://172.16.12.131:8447

from there everything was fine, hope this tips help you get straight to the solution 🙂

cheers