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fuck you, Plesk
Tuesday, September 28 2010
I spent much of the day trying to reinstall a set of four similar websites onto a virtual host running a hosting program called Plesk. Plesk is designed to take the complexity and aggravation out of managing a Linux server by using user-friendly web-based administrative tools in place of the editing of configuration files. The problem with such a system is the problem with many systems that try to abstract-away complexity: the moment you want to do anything the least bit unusual, the whole system breaks down. Plesk solves the "config-file problem" by creating a bunch of config files of its own that it hides away from the pretty heads of its users. So then, when options in Plesk don't support something that is needed (in my case, allowing all subdomains of a website to go to the same place as the root domain, ie: eatme.dickhead.com and eatass.dickhead.com both go to dickhead.com), you find yourself having to hack not just the familiar Apache configuration files, but the crazy shit spewed out by Plesk. The problem is analogous to editing the HTML spewed out by Microsoft Word in its HTML export (an ugly mess that clearly reflects Microsoft's disdain for the both the web and all that is beautiful and succinct). I kept editing these files and experiencing completely chaotic behavior. Sometimes the results would improve the situation, but then sometimes all my gains would be lost and I'd be asked if I wanted to download a file of type "application/x-httpd-php." Yeah, well fuck you too! I found myself screaming at my computer. But then anger turned to sadness and I began to plead. If the watcher on charge in my brain had been asleep at the switch and not tracking the absurdity of my bargaining with an inanimate object, eventually I would have been sobbing.
At some point I found the key to fixing this mess was deleting some files whose extension wasn't even .conf. Yeah, fuck you, Plesk!
It was another full day of downpours punctuated with occasional periods of something less than downpours. It's as if Zeus Allah McChrist is trying to make up for the drought He gave us this summer.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?100928 feedback
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