Installing Plesk on a Ubuntu or Debian server this days seems to end up with some issues in some cases were the base OS has some extra packages added to it.
Plesk is using hardcoded UID’s for it’s install so if there is a user on the system that already uses the UID needed for one of the users Plesk needs to put in place will cause the install to crash/stop/abort with an error like:
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
ERROR: An error occurred on attempt to install packages. Attention! Your software might be inoperable
The full snippet of the error looks like this for Plesk Panel 9.0.1 on an Ubuntu 8.04 server:
Errors were encountered while procesing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/plesk-base 9.0.1-ubuntu8.04.build90090127.18.i386.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
ERROR: An error occurred on attempt to install packages. Attention! Your software might be inoperable
One of the issues is that you don’t see the main reason for this error directly so to exactly catch the problem and see the actual error and why the install crashes/stops one thing you could try is to install the Plesk package directly like:
dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/plesk-base 9.0.1-ubuntu8.04.build90090127.18.i386.deb
After running the last command your install may stop and error out but at least it will show you were the problem is, the error i am speaking in this post will be:
ERROR: It seems there is a user with UID=110 in this system, but Plesk needs the same UID for its operating. Unfortunately, this situation has not yet been resolved.
Resolution:
A small tweak will be needed if you want to get over this issue and that would be to check and edit the /etc/passwd file and change the UID for the user that uses the UID needed by Plesk, in this case 110.
In my install the UID=110 was attributed to the identd user so i had to change that but you have to make sure this UID is not used by any other user already existing on the server.
What i did was changing the UID for the identd user from 110 to 111(in my case this one was not used) and then start the install again.
Guess what, the install finished just fine and Plesk got installed with no issue.
Hope this helps!
I’ve come across this issue a number of times, always when the root user has been enabled. Always works fine when the root user is disabled and I’m installing using my account and sudo.
I was expecting that they fixed this issue after so many versions but seems not to be so.
I guess it depends on their testing methods but after a few clients report this bug any company should take measures to fix the reported bugs.
This happened to me, installing Plesk 9.5.2 on a stock Ubuntu 8.04 server. There were a couple of interesting complications…
UID 110 was assigned to the “mysql” user. I changed it to 111 and tried to run the Plesk install again. But before I could do that, I had to clean up the package dependencies, since the package install was interrupted (sudo apt-get -f install), and during this process, I was prompted to create a MySQL root password. So I did.
Then I tried the Plesk install again. This time, it gave me the same error, so I checked… the bind user was now set to 110. So I changed it to 112.
Then I tried the Plesk install again. This time, it started throwing errors about not being able to connect to the MySQL database. Oops! Looks like it expects the root password to be blank. Had to reset that.
Then it finally worked right.
All because they want to use a fixed UID. I wonder why this didn’t show up during their testing…