Parallels Plesk 11.5 to 12 Upgrade Problems

After recently upgrading a Windows 2008 R2 web server from Parallels 11.5 to Parallels 12, I ran in to a series of fairly serious issues that I thought I would document here in the hopes that it might help others.  These were previously listed on my Parallels Plesk 12 Review as I effectively had to stop the review due to the problems but now all is working again, I thought it better to separate the two. What is interesting to note about my upgrade from Plesk 11.5 to 12 is that I received no warning messages or errors during the whole upgrade process (I sat and watched the whole thing having had issues with the upgrades from Plesk 10 to 11 in the past).  I had restarted the server both before and after the update to ensure as many resources as possible were available during the installation and the new version was properly ‘bedded in’ when I started using it. Once the upgrade was complete I browsed straight to a couple of customer websites and saw they were running fine and sent a few test emails and they were correctly routed – great I thought!

Here There Be Errors…

Having been lulled in to a false sense of security by my brief tests and lack of error messages, I was dismayed to find the Plesk Panel effectively broken and on further investigation, half of the websites offline.

Plesk Panel Problems

All Subscriptions Missing

Right off the bat, clicking ‘Hosting Services > Subscriptions’  shows ‘No Items Found’ – initiate panic.

Solution:

1. The root cause was a Plesk database inconsistency.  An incorrect column had been created ‘externalid’ (duplicating the ‘external_id’ values) in ‘domains’ table.
2. In order to fix the issue first, create a backup of psa database.
3. Restore the pre-upgrade dump of psa databases.
4. Remove the ‘externalid’ field from domains table in the psa database.
5. Run the Plesk database upgrade process manually:
   C:\Program Files (x86)\Parallels\Plesk\admin\bin>dbupgrade –upgrade –from-version=11.5.30 –to-version=12.0.18

Can’t Login to Subscriptions

I was able to view my subscriptions via the ‘Business Operations > Subscriptions’ section of Plesk but clicking login yields an error like “Error: Subscription with such external id B7D16FCB-F669-4BA5-ABBA-987E3ADED085 does not exist”

Solution: The steps above for fixing the missing subscriptions also solved this issue,

Can’t Login as Reseller

A new feature I was pleased to see was the ‘Login’ feature under Hosting Services > Resellers  but unfortunately clicking it simply returns me to the homepage of the Plesk with an error like “login_up__billing_local_credentials_for_global_account”

Solution: The steps above for fixing the missing subscriptions also solved this issue,

Plesk Panel HTTP 500 Internal Server Error

After all the other issues were sorted, I started receiving intermittent PHP errors on page loads of the Plesk Panel with the following error reported:

HTTP Error 500.0 – Internal Server Error

C:\Program Files (x86)\Parallels\Plesk\admin\bin\php-cgi.exe – The FastCGI process exited unexpectedly

Solution: Problem Still Occuring

Hosted Website Problems & Errors

WordPress

Many WordPress websites were showing errors regarding permissions and/or open_base dir.

Solution: Go to the PHP Settings option for your website and change the open_basedir option to none.

ASP Website Errors

ASP Websites that attempt to write anything to the hard drive were kicking up permission denied errors.

Solution: prior to the upgrade I had to only grant read/write access to folders that needed to be written to by the website to the websites IUSR account (for example IUSR_acme.com) but now they also have to be granted to the IWAM_plesk account.

PHP Website Errors

Any PHP website attempting to use session variables was getting errors, I created a 5 line Hello World test page to confirm this that did nothing other than try and set a session variable, it got the following error:

PHP Warning:  session_start(): open(C:\Windows\Temp\sess_moe6mgf9b51i29h5vfo8fo1o1, O_RDWR) failed: Permission denied (13) in F:\PLESK\WWW\acme.com\httpdocs\index.php on line 2
PHP Warning:  Unknown: open(C:\Windows\Temp\sess_moe3p367451i29h5vfo8fo1o1, O_RDWR) failed: Permission denied (13) in Unknown on line 0
PHP Warning:  Unknown: Failed to write session data (files). Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct (C:\Windows\Temp) in Unknown on line 0

Solution: After a lot of messing around with PHP settings and file/folder permissions I solved this by Simply Deleting all the items in the C:\Windows\Temp folder!