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So what (if anything) do I do if my stuff is on west? Do I need to sign up somewhere or something?

Asking because chrome tells me that the SSL certificate on https://west.lvcs.net:8443 is now 200+ days past expiry.

And the nameservice on west appears not to be running right now:


sven@ ~
$  nslookup NS1.WEST.LVCS.NET 8.8.8.8
Non-authoritative answer:
Server:  google-public-dns-a.google.com
Address:  8.8.8.8

Name:    NS1.WEST.LVCS.NET
Address:  50.62.148.171

sven@ ~
$ ping NS1.WEST.LVCS.NET

Pinging ns1.west.lvcs.net [50.62.148.171] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 50.62.148.171: bytes=32 time=13ms TTL=52
Reply from 50.62.148.171: bytes=32 time=13ms TTL=52
Reply from 50.62.148.171: bytes=32 time=13ms TTL=52


sven@ ~
$  nslookup NS1.WEST.LVCS.NET NS1.WEST.LVCS.NET

*** Request to UnKnown timed-out
DNS request timed out.
    timeout was 2 seconds.
Server:  UnKnown
Address:  50.62.148.171

DNS request timed out.
    timeout was 2 seconds.
DNS request timed out.
    timeout was 2 seconds.
DNS request timed out.
    timeout was 2 seconds.
DNS request timed out.
    timeout was 2 seconds.



(I paid for 3 years last time, so I don't get payment emails,
so I might have missed some information somewhere. Probably my fault.
Sorry in advance if that's the case.)

Ah, indeed - that worked. Plesk just has me confused. I thought it was just for website management - I didn't realize it reaches as far down as DNS.

(I can see why there's not much traffic here - I come here once a year on average because your stuff usually "just works" for years at a time. I keep recommending LVCS to friends for its utter painlessnes...)

[The zone file is unavailable because the domain's set nameservers do not belong to this registrar.]

If this doesn't belong here, could someone point me to the right place? Thank you.

I have my domain (sgeier.net) registered with LVCS.net
I have it pointed at my freepgs website which is on west.lvcs.net
The nameservers are set to ns1.west.lvcs.net and ns2.west.lvcs.net

Everything works as expected.

I also have my computer at home, which I had set (years ago) to be a subdomain of sgeier.net
I'm pretty sure that was done through the zone file somehow[? I may be wrong here]
I just changed ISPs and wanted to point the subdomain to the new IP address of my home computer

Yet in the LVCS domain manager, when I click on the "DNS Zone File" tab, I get a message "The zone file is unavailable because the domain's set nameservers do not belong to this registrar."

This has me confused. If LVCS doesn't own ns[12].west.lvcs.net, then who does?

I have for now set up subdomain forwarding to my new IP address, though I suspect that the nameservers are never going to see that subdomain since the zone file already points at the old (no longer valid) IP address.

I am strongly suspecting that I'm just doing something stupid. DNS is ... if not black magic, so at least somewhat confusing to me.

Thanks for any light you can shed on this (or pointer to a different person I should be asking).

I really should come here more often than twice a year - there's all kinds of exciting news. SFTP on west -- I gotta try that. Then I can finally ditch the clunky old FTP...

The reason I did come here, however, was to draw your attention to this:
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/06/more-than-360000-apache-websites-imperiled-by-crticial-vulnerability/
which looks as if plesk5/6 might be vulnerable

Gotcha, ok. Just making sure I'm not doing something dumb on my side here.

Take whatever time you need :-)

OK, so "stuff happens" and my site is down for now. I'll go with that.

However, is plesk4 also the nameserver for my domain? (Edit: Clicking though the tools from lvcs.net it looks as if name servers are plsk5 and plsk6 - those resolve) I'm asking, because it seems as if my domain is not resolving at all any more (and there's parts of it that point to computers other than freepgs, which are now apparently unreachable as well, it appears...)

I sifted through my email and I'm pretty sure I didn't get anything about this (until last week).

I changed my passwords and all seems well (I had written myself a little wrapper around wget to retrieve all my html files and compare their MD5s with known good values once a day, and there was no further activity on that account).

I'm in Los Angeles, and as far as I understand it that means plesk4 is the one I should be using? Or should I migrate somewhere else?

So this is what I hear from someone smart in a different forum:

The most common way for websites to get infected is apparently by running a version of Plesk earlier than 11 - and your host was running Plesk 8 according to the virus scanners:
http://blog.unmaskparasites.com/2012/06/26/millions-of-website-passwords-stored-in-plain-text-in-plesk-panel/

Notice your password is stored in cleartext, and until your host updates Plesk anybody will be able to retrieve it again - even if you change it.

As for what happens for people who visits the site, there is a description here:
http://blog.unmaskparasites.com/2012/06/22/runforestrun-and-pseudo-random-domains/

This would mean you guys really need to update plesk ...

[EDIT:]

So I just found that my index.html (in httpdocs) had been replaced with one that looked identical but had a 22kb javascript exploit at the end.

I removed that and replaced it with the correct one.

(EDIT: Strike this part, at least; my ftp client doesn't list -a by default. Doh. Everything else is still as described, though ... In that process I also noticed that all the ".htaccess" files in the various directories had been removed. Replacing them (by plain FTP) appears not to work - they vanish as soon as I place them there.)

I do not know how my web-directory could've been accessed other than from your side - is there something rogue running that is messing with people's files? When I go to http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/scanner/ and run a check on my site (which reported as infected, now reports clean) it tells me that the version of plesk running there is outdated.

Can someone else have a look at their index.html file and possibly error document (and possibly .htaccess files) and confirm or deny that there's a problem here somewhere? Thanks in advance.

Another voice that thinks $3 was ridiculously cheap. By all means, make it $10/year - I would still consider that cheap.

The main benefit I get from Freepgs is the uncapped bandwidth: I host a bunch of (my own) electronic art to share with the world and I go for a year at a time with only mild interest in(/access to) my web pages - and then one of my things gets published somewhere prominent and suddenly I get tens of thousands of hits in a few weeks. And I really like that I don't have to worry about those moments in terms of hitting some kind of BW limit or such. I'm not aware of any other place that gives me this kind of flexibility.

Yes, we will be turning off the old machines Plesk3 and Plesk4 in the very near future.

All accounts were migrated to Plesk6 from Plesk3.  We have not yet shut down the Plesk3 server, but we will by the end of the month to avoid additional charges.

Plesk4 has not yet been migrated, but hopefully there will be time this weekend or next.

I rarely come here to these forums, since most of the time you guys stuff "just works". So now I'm catching up with the last years worth of stuff and I find this message from May alerting me to the fact that plesk4 will go away "this weekend or next". Well, as far as I can tell, plesk4 is still there. Unless this is a different (new) machine that has the same name? Is there still some kind of migration planned? Is there anything I should do or watch out for (I'm on plesk4)?

[Update:]

OK, money is sent (or so says PayPal).  

Is there anything else I need to do to get this restarted? Email someone? Spill the blood of a goat under a full moon?

Update: You guys did indeed send me a reminder email, but my spamfilter ate it. Gmail is cool, but apparently not quite that cool.

Yeah - I didn't get a reminder email either. Only noticed right now that my site is gone. Oops.

Money's on the way as soon as I figure out how that worked (doing something once a year means I have to re-learn the process again every time).

Why on earth would I not want this continued? I love this!! I don't exactly make a lot of money of my site, so I don't think I could afford to spend a whole lot of money on hosting...

So I just got that email again that I exceeded my disk space limit. I've learned from the last time so I checked "report" and indeed it says Disk space used by Log files and statistical reports   2.15 GB. OK, so I go to the log manager and it tells me that the largest log file of mine by far is "access_log.processed.1.gz" which is 131MB. There's a smattering of other things that cannot possibly add to another 100MB -- nothing anywhere near 2GB.

So I'm stumped again. I don't even know where to look for the webalizer output (i.e. the files - so I can check for the size they consume; I know how to access the output), but I've been running webalizer for years elseweb and its total collected space use is maybe 5MB, so this can't really be consume 2GB of space either.

So I'm stumped again what to do to get my disk usage within the limits.

Now webalizer here is hardwired not to collect/display leaf-statistics, which is the only reason I would want it to begin with; so for all I care I could just switch the damn thing off and get rid of these "log files and statistical reports" entirely, but I can't even find where to do that.

If it is even possible.

The main part of my frustration stems from the fact that this systems is making it very hard to be a good neighbor and clean up after myself and make sure I'm not stepping on anybodies toes. I'm really trying to do the right thing here, and one would think it would be in everybody's interest to make this task as easy for me as possible; not as byzantine and labyrinthine as possible.

So - any help out there? (and sorry for the ranting...)

Oh, OK. Strike that - I found it. It was piled-up log-files. Now to find the place where I can tell plesk that logfiles can be deleted once they've been processed by webalizer...