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Plesk and Parallels Under Fire?

Posted by hosttycoon On November - 25 - 2009

parallels-plesk-panel-under-fire“After encounter an issue that the server can’t reboot into safe mode”, posted today forum member “Onemancrew” in Web Hosting Talk. He explained that the bug appears when the he tried to reboot his server into safe mode. After the login screen was shown , after a few seconds automatic reboot would be done, and “no matter what you will do , you will not be able to boot your server into safe mode”.

“Yes, if you wonder your self , after you install Plesk Control Panel over Windows Server 2003 you can forget your safe mode” adds “Onemancrew” and also says that the bug exist from version 7.6 until version 8.6.

The WTH member has posted in the forum thread that he hasn’t checked version 9.2 yet. But he added that he was “99.9% sure that this bug also exist in 9.2 version of Plesk Control Panel”. The bug in this version according to “Onemancrew” is that when installing Plesk Control Panel on Windows Server 2003 the control panel user can not reboot their server in Safe Mode. He also says that the OS will make automatic reboot after showing the login screen.

“Parallels doesn’t worth your money. They don’t care about customer, all they care is about releasing more and more products but the word “quality” is unknown for Parallels developers”, states “Onemancrew” and makes the suggestion “Don’t use Plesk Control Panel” and provides the argument that “If application make the platform to stop working correctly then such software need to be abandoned”.

He has also created a new post shortly after the original thread was being opened and said that the ridiculous matter here was that Parallels demanded to get money for opening support ticket despite the fact that this is 100% Plesk bug. According to him the software producer’s policy is “to get money even about bug fixes”.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous. This is not how a software company need to treat existing customers”, said “Onemancrew”.

What did WHT members respond?

“This is the reason I switched to cPanel, I was having issues left and right with Plesk and their support team was never very helpful or I had to pay out the ass to get them to just look at it. cPanel support is superior for any software company that I’ve come across”, said Canadian member of Web Hosting Talk named “Certis”.

Here comes a WHT member with a nickname “Drew_Parallels” who responded thathe wanted to let the community know that he saw the thread and alerted Parallels development team. “They’re investigating the bug now. As a possible (though not amazing) workaround, would be to set the Plesk Management Service (plesksrv) to Manual or Disable mode. Then you should be able to start up in Safe Mode. Unfortunately, Plesk has to be started manually after that. I’ll let you know as soon as the developers get back to me”, says “Drew_Parallels” and ads “Sorry about the bug”!

A few members of WHT who joined the thread thanked to Drew and showed their understanding.

The thread continues with “Onemancrew” who posted “The BIG question is WHEN?”. He adds that he is asking the right question here because Drew wrote that the Parallels developing team was working about a bug fix.

“But again, the question is when the bug fix will be released for the public ?  It’s ridiculous that such BUG exist for 3 years! And until now the QA team didn’t find it. What does it mean that QA team didn’t find such a bug?  It’s means that SWsoft doesn’t have any QA team.”

“The word QA is unknown at SWsoft Company” (SWsoft is the old name of Parallels), wrote “Onemancrew”.

Another WHT member “Dynamicnet” addressed Drew and said that he posted his questions. “Like the post above, it has to do with QA (not only in software development, but also in writing KB articles). For example, http://kb.parallels.com/en/6656 could not have gone through quality assurance. Aside from easy to catch spelling errors, there are 21 hard coded patch files without any documentation”, writes “Dynamicnet”.

“Say you want to upgrade from Clam Anti-virus 0.95.2 to 0.95.3 using http://kb.parallels.com/en/6656 you have to contend with /src/hsphere-clamav.patch which is hard coded for 0.95.2 without any instructions on how to recreate the file for use with 0.95.3. Similarly there are 20 other hard coded patch files blocking the way of other upgrades making http://kb.parallels.com/en/6656 worthless. Furthermore, http://kb.parallels.com/en/6656 makes Parallels look bad because it is yet another public proof Parallels does not take quality assurance seriously”, added the WHT member.

Follow the whole thread “The Bigest BUG inside Plesk Control Panel, The Bigest BUG that SWsoft/Parallels Want” in Web Hosting Talk.