I keep this blog article as a place holder to collate all the issues I have with upgrading my Plesk server from 8.x to 9.3. Each time Plesk produces a new version there are always hacks and fixes that need to be applied to make things work. These days you have to be more than just a system’s administrator; you have to be a programmer and script’er. Luckily for me (and you) I am all three! Spam is not filtered properly for a domain The first manifestation of this problem is in the /var/log/messages file. The following message repeats a couple of times a minute.

spam_hook[pid]: unable to open configuration file /etc/psa/psa.conf: Permission denied

The /etc/psa/psa.conf file holds the locations to system resource folders used by Plesk, for example PLESK_MAILNAMES_D which points to the root of the mail folders for each domain. Checking the permissions of the file show that it is readable:

# ls -l /etc/psa/psa.conf -rw-r–r– 1 root root 2564 Mar 9 15:16 /etc/psa/psa.conf

so the problem must be with one of the parent folders. If you didn’t have access to /etc then almost everything would stop working and you would notice straight away. So the problem must be with the /etc/psa folder. Checking that revealed a permission error.

drwxr-x— 5 psaadm psaadm 4096 May 6 12:02 /etc/psa

With the permissions set this way (750), the pop user and the spam filtering daemons would fail because they do not have the required permission to read the psa.conf file. In order to fix the problem we must allow all users to read files from that folder. We will add the execute permission to the folder to allow others to read a file if they explicitly know the name but won’t allow anyone else to view the contents of the folder or to alter anything in it. Changing the permissions like so will allow the other programs and users to read the file.

chown 751 /etc/psa

which produces the file permissions:

drwxr-x–x 5 psaadm psaadm 4096 May 6 12:02 /etc/psa

There is no need to restart any services or reboot. Everything will just start working.