Plesk can be a pain
Friday, November 16th, 2007I had to do some system administration on the company server yesterday. I’ve two things to note.
1.) This is a nice list of commands for user management.
2.) Plesk makes normal system administration a nightmare. It sets up its own config files that override the defaults for most of the software on a Linux system. While Plesk makes some tasks easy for non-technical people, it makes normal system administration (where you ssh to the server) a real pain. You can follow some tutorial exactly, like the directions for adding a user on this page, and your work has no effect. Last night I was able to set up a user account, but was not able to set a working password. Turns out the passwords were controlled by Plesk.
[Added later:] Okay, I’m an idiot. I was trying to create a user account like this:
useradd -groot -Gadm,wheel,psacln -s/bin/bash -p947364 -d/home/lawrence -m lawrence
The helpful tech staff at RackSpace wrote (in reply to my question) that this command expects the password to be encrypted. So the correct way to add a user (at least on a RackSpace server running RedHat Linux) is as follows:
1.) ssh to the server using some non-root account
2.) after you log in, su to root
3.) run the above command without the password
4.) then run this command:
passwd lawrence
5.) then type in the password you want for the user “lawrence”