Working with Plesk 7.5.4 on Windows 2003 Rumi, August 13, 2008August 13, 2008 Well- this is a mammoth task but a tiny task as well!! Plesk has got nothing but to be installed and up & run in no time! It’s true- I’ve worked with cPanel and Virtualmin on Linux and worked with HostingController on windows and PLESK on windows! Recently, Plesk was acquired by Parallel which was previously owned by SWSoft- if I can recall my memories, PLESK was initially a hosting automation project by a Russian Web Development Company- and now, they have turned out into mamoth!!! Let’s not lecture on this any more- getting to the experiences right away! Step 1- Installing Windows 2003 Server Let me assume you’re planning to set up PLESK on a single server (may be with multiple processors with bigger drive bays) Assuming Web, Mail, FTP and DNS will be hosted on the same machine Also assuming you have 3 Disk partitions- usually C:\ for the OS D:\ for Web and E:\ for Mails Well, we’re installing Windows on C:\ We’re installing Plesk in D:\ (for data backup or for safe side) Now there- you have to set up a clean Windows installation on the server! Modules to be installed on Windows (you can check this out on post-installation by running the installation disk again and selecting “Installing Optional Components” : Application Server and enable- Application Server Console ASP.NET Enable network COM+ access Internet Information Services (IIS) > and click details and enable- Common Files File Transfer Protocol (FTP) Service Front Pacge 2002 Server Extensions Internet Information Services Manager World Wide Web Service > Details and enable Everything! Networking Services and enable Domain Name System (DNS) You’re done with Step-1 Step-2- Installing QoS Service In order to bandwidth manage, PLESK uses windows QoS Services. Let’s see how to activate this. Right click on “My Network Places” from the desktop. Select Properties Under “General” tab click “Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)” and select “Install”. probably you came here before for setting up IPs. Click “Services” and then “Add” A window will pop-up, and here’ you’ll find “QoS Packet Scheduler” That’s it- you’re done! Step-3- Setting up the application environment with .NET framework installtion: In order to provide your customers with .NET feature (2.0/3.0/3.5) you need to obtain them directly from microsoft site. For 3.5 you can go- http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=333325FD-AE52-4E35-B531-508D977D32A6&displaylang=en For 2.0 download link- http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=0856eacb-4362-4b0d-8edd-aab15c5e04f5&displaylang=en For 3.0 download link- http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=10CC340B-F857-4A14-83F5-25634C3BF043&displaylang=en Download those files and install it. You’re done with .NET enabling on the IIS Step-4- Setting up the Host Name Since PLESK doesn’t require a Active Directory so be aware on running the DCPROMO command. I repeat DO NOT INSTALL ACTIVE DIRECTORY ON A PLESK HOSTING SERVER!!!! So, how to set up the host name as FQDN? Ppl get confused on FQDN. Let’s see what wiki says about FQDN- A fully qualified domain name (or FQDN) is an unambiguous domain name that specifies the exact location in the Domain Name System‘s tree hierarchy through to a top-level domain and finally to the root domain. Technically, a FQDN has a trailing dot (for example: somehost.example.com.), but most DNS resolvers will treat any domain name that already has a dot as being an FQDN[1] and add the final dot needed for the root of the DNS tree. Resolvers will treat a domain name without a dot as unqualified and automatically add a default domain name and the final dot. Some applications, such as web browsers will try to qualify the domain name part of a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) if the resolver can not find the domain. In other cases, such as DNS zone files, the trailing dot is always required to denote a FQDN. An FQDN differs from a regular domain name by its absoluteness; a default domain name will not be added. For example, given a device with a local hostname of myhost and a default parent domain name of example.com, the fully qualified domain name is myhost.example.com.. It therefore uniquely defines the device — whilst there might be many hosts in the world called “myhost”, there can only be one myhost.example.com.. Notice that there is a dot at the very end of the domain name, i.e. it ends .com. and not .com — this ensures that the name is an FQDN. For example myhost.bar.com could be ambiguous, because not all resolvers assume that domain names containing a dot are absolute and the domain name could be the prefix of a longer domain name such as myhost.bar.com.au, whereas myhost.bar.com. is a fully qualified domain name. In practice, the trailing dot is almost always omitted in everyday applications, making such domain references technically ambiguous. Now let’s be normal. Besides beating bush in the with the theories!!! Right click on “My Computer” Choose “Computer Name” tab While installing you probably gave a machine name (which actually the Name Server Prefix in your domain). Like I gave mine as “Ns1”. So, in “Full computer name: ns1” will be shown Now click “Change” to add the domain suffix an to make a FQDN format Again choose “More” In “Primary DNS suffix of this computer:” enter your domain name for hosting purpose- like I gave mine as “geospacehosting.com” Click “OK” You’re done! Well, that’s enough for this section- I’ll describe the Plesk installation and fine tuning on a standard setup in another blog post. Configurations (Windows)