Plesk Session Problem

[Accumike]

This might apply if your hosting server uses Plesk.
Hope this might help anyone else who has been ambushed by this problem!

Here's what happened and here's how we fixed it:
We host several sites using MX Kollection / ADDT on a VPS from a large hosting company, using Linux, Apache and Plesk 11. Occasionally Plesk is updated and it rebuilds itself. What sometimes happens next is that all the Linux / Apache user IDs (one for each web site) are lost and you can't create a session as the server does not know where to put the session tmp files. The result is that you can't log in, post a form etc.

Linux, Apache and Plesk are not my area of expertise, so I asked a friend, who discovered the above explanation. His fix was to create permanent user IDs in Linux.

*** NB: If you use the following solution, this is at your own risk ***

1. Create web site in Plesk
2. SSH to server
3. su - root
4. usermod -a -G apache <WEB SITE OWNER NAME>

Web Site Owner Name is usually the FTP user/login name, so an example might be:

usermod -a -G apache my-site-ftp-user

You can list the group members with this command:

cat /etc/group

There should be one for each web site.

*** NB: If you use the above solution, this is at your own risk ***