HOW TO: Enabling root on a new server?

[Tom Samplonius]

----- "Michael Williams" <gberz3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> No,  I don't necessarily need Plesk; although we will be selling  
> hosting.  It simply came with the default configuration for the  
> server.  My plan is to manage most everything from the Unix shell.  I 
> 
> just figured I might find a morsel inside Plesk somewhere for  
> enabling root access.  FYI, logging in as admin didn't work.  Any  
> other suggestions?

  You are probably better off just asking the hosting company for the password.  You need the root password, and you need to have an account that is a member of the wheel group (use "groups" when you ssh to see if your account is ok).

  They might have flagged you as a newbie, and think you are better off inside the padded confines of Plesk.  I work at a hosting company, and a whole bunch of our dedicated server customers are in over their heads with their servers as it is.  Given that you asked for Plesk, and are now asking for root, they are probably has made them worried that the next call from you will be that you deleted /etc, and  your server won't boot anymore.

  If you are planning to do any admin via ssh with root, you will not want Plesk.  Plesk manages all of your software installs.  Plesk includes Plesk specific versions of Apache, PHP, and MySQL.  All patches and updates can only come from SWSoft, or the Plesk universe will crash.  And Plesk ties you to a specific FreeBSD version too.  Plesk versions lag big time for FreeBSD.  But on the other hand, it is big GUI thing, and people like it.


Tom