More Plesk tips for troubleshooting

I must say that given the complexities of the amount of software packages that control panels (Plesk, cPanel, etc.) have to manage, they do a remarkably good job. Especially since the have to coordinate changes among dozens of different virtual hosts as well. And in Plesk's case, it does it in a cross-platform compatible way as well, working on Windows/IIS as well as Linux/Apache. But it still manages to frustrate me on a weekly basis with a head-scratching problem. This week went over quota with two problems, one of which I described here.

The second was caused after we upgraded a client's MailEnable installation from 3.14 to 3.6 on their Windows 2003/IIS Plesk server. From their own KB article, SWsoft says that you just have to follow the standard MailEnable upgrade instructions and Plesk will automatically detect the new version, so everything will be hunky-dory.

Well, after I finished the MailEnable upgrade, things were definitely not hunky-dory. The admin control panel was breaking with regularity, as the application pool repeatedly died and the Plesk event log filled up with errors. After shortening the process recycle time from 1740 to 240 minutes and upping the max processes from 1 to 4, the PleskControlPanel application pool stabilized. However, we were still seeing problems whenever we added or removed a domain. Multiple errors showed up in the Plesk event log similar to the following:


Execute websrvmng --start-vhost "--vhost-name=domainname.com" failed: Site domainname.com
Execute file name: C:\Program Files\SWsoft\Plesk\admin\bin\domainmng.exe

After digging through some forums and digging through the logs without finding a conclusive cause, I decided to go with my intuition. We'd had problems with MailEnable changing IIS settings before, so the best bet was to re-sync the IIS configuration from the stored Plesk configuration data using the websrvmng utility. Not much documentation exists for the *mng.exe command-line utilities found in the %plesk_bin% directory, but I've found them invaluable for fixing unknown problems such as this. I ran the following commands and after 10 minutes of processing, all was well again (fingers crossed).

websrvmng --reconfigure-all
ftpmng --reconfigure-all