At Cadent , we use Parallels Plesk Control Panel Software for Hosting on our servers (we’ve also used the open source Webmin and the commercial CPanel). Plesk has a great user interface, which our clients appreciate. It also imposes its own way of doing things, which can be a bit of a pain when tracking down subtle issues with server configuration. Because Plesk rewrites many configuration files automatically, it’s really critical to ensure that I make any manual changes to the server configuration in the right place, or Plesk will overwrite my efforts without remorse. The issue we needed to address was this: we installed Joomla! 1.0 on our development server, and Joomla reported the following configuration problems: • Safe mode was on, needs to be off. • The session directory was unwriteable. PHP: Safe Mode is a global setting allows only a file's owner or group to execute the script or read a file. Clearly, this is a good thing for security...
News, notes and resources on open source, Linux, and UNIX computers; By Neil Johnson, Cadent Technologies Corp.