Ass-backwards compatibility



  • Due to my company being run by the non-technical boss and whichever CS student is stupid enough to to part-time work here (that would be me right now), our infrastructure has a few peculiarities. One of them is that we rented a managed server to run virtually our entire infrastructure on because administrators are expensive, you know. This server is essentially a glorified hosting package: No SSH, no custom software, no access to most log files; the only way to manage anything is a Plesk reseller account. Since automation is good and allows our customers (who don't get direct Plesk access) to do things like setting up mail accounts themselves we heavily rely on Plesk's XML-RPC API. It's not a very good API but we manage.



    Recently the server was upgraded from Plesk 9.5 to Plesk 11. The documentation says that Plesk 11 is fully compatible with the 9.5 version of the API. The documentation was written by an idiot. For instance, one of the internal data types was changed and is no longer compatible with the old version of the API. Whoops. Looks like we'll have to rewrite some of our "fully compatible" code, but at least it's a quick fix.



    But wait, there's another "small" problem: One call (used to inquire about a reseller's or client domains) is no longer able to return any domains not directly owned by the reseller. If you ask for all domains you get the reseller's domains; if you apply any sort of filter the API bombs out and returns an empty string. Good job, Parallels! (It's not like the API didn't randomly die on me before but then I could usually use a silly workaround like making the request as a client. No such luck here.)



    The best part? We can't even call our hosting provider and have them look into things because the Plesk API is explicitly unsupported. Yes, we built our entire infrastructure around a feature of our server that the provider will not support and that we can't debug ourselves because we don't have access to the server.



    I don't know what's sillier: Plesk's sad excuse for an API or renting a server without even checking whether the SLA covers everything we need.



  • @j6cubic said:

    I don't know what's sillier: Plesk's sad excuse for an API or renting a server without even checking whether the SLA covers everything we need.
     

    Plesk sucks the fat wongo. So did Ensim for a while.

    I really thought having a control panel would reduce a huge workload but the amount of workarounds and tweaks required cancelled out any time savings. In the end I do stuff manually over ssh on my servers, and it doesn't seem to be as big an effort as I thought.



  • @j6cubic said:

    we built our entire infrastructure around a feature of our server that the provider will not support and that we can't debug ourselves because we don't have access to the server.


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