Hosting a website isn’t always smooth sailing. You can occasionally land in troubled waters such as DB corruption, mailbox errors, etc.

At Bobcares, our Server Support Engineers often resolve such data corruption issues using native commands like mysqlcheck, myisamcheck, etc.

In Plesk servers, there’s an all-in-one tool called Plesk Onyx Repair to repair crashed services.

Today, let’s discuss how we use this tool to repair Plesk services like DNS, Mysql, Mail, etc.

What is Plesk Onyx Repair Utility?

Plesk Onyx offers a tool, Repair kit which automatically identifies and fix issues with the Plesk services.

It can free up memory, disk space, restart services and moreover, it can restart the server as well.

But, sometimes, this may not work as expected.

 

So, here, we use Plesk Onyx Repair tool aka Plesk self-repair to diagnose and fix issues with these Plesk services.

Plesk repair utility checks and repairs individual aspects of Plesk (mail, DNS, mysql, etc.) or all the aspects at once.

To run the Plesk repair utility, we login to the server via SSH or RDP and run the below command.

plesk repair ASPECT [OPTION]

 

Here,  ASPECT can be mail, ftp, web, etc. depending on the error. We’ll discuss this more in the later part of this article.

Servers owners can run this utility in 3 modes.

• Interactive mode – This is the default mode for Plesk repair utility. Some issues can be resolved only with interactive mode. For example, to resolve website issues with a missing PHP handler, this requires you to select from a list of options.
• Diagnostic mode – Plesk repair utility informs you about the problems, but doesn’t resolve them. Run diagnostic mode by using the plesk repair command with -n option.
• Repair mode – Plesk repair utility tries to resolve the detected issues. It also re-configure the services when necessary. Run repair mode by using the plesk repair command with -y option.

 

Whenever a problem is detected by the Plesk repair tool, it classifies it as either a warning or an error based on the severity.

If all the detected issues are warnings or no issues are detected, the output code is 0.

And, if any single issue is the error, the output code is 1.

 

[Trouble accessing your website, mail or database? Our Support Experts can fix it for you!!]

How to use Plesk Onyx Repair Utility?

Now, let’s see how our Support Engineers use this tool to reconfigure every Plesk service.

1) Plesk Repair Utility : All

The Plesk repair utility with All aspect do a complete check of every aspect on your server.

In other words, it’ll do all the checks included in the other aspects.

For example, see the below command.

plesk repair all

 

This command checks the installation of Plesk and all Plesk services.

Also, you are in interactive mode, so you’ll be prompted for permission to fix when a problem is detected.

The only downside is that this command takes a long time to execute on a server with many domains.

And, result in a high server load.

Therefore, our Hosting Engineers always execute this command during the off peak hours to reduce the impact.

 

2) Plesk Repair Utility : Mail

We use the Plesk repair utility with mail aspect to re-configure the mail settings of domains and mailboxes.

In addition to that, we customize this mail aspect with additional options, depending on the scenarios.

Here are some of the additional options we frequently use.

-restore-configuration - Restores the mail server configuration.
-only-domain-settings  - Reconfigures the mail settings for domains only.
-dont-restore-password - Reconfigures the mail settings without synchronizing the mailbox passwords between the Plesk database and the mail server.

 

Similarly, we customize this tool to repair the mail settings of individual domains or mailboxes.

For instance, to repair the mail settings of a domain “domain.com”, we use the below command.

plesk repair mail domain.com

 

3) Plesk Repair Utility : Web

Our Hosting Engineers use this utility with web aspect to reconfigure web server and domain configuration files.

In addition to that, this also gives the option to re-install SSL/TLS certificates, resolve issues with missing PHP handlers, etc.

Moreover, we customize this web aspect with additional options, depending on the scenarios.

Here are some of the additional options we frequently use.

-domains-only - Regenerates the configuration files for domains only.
-sslcerts - Reinstalls all SSL/TLS certificates and configures all IP addresses to use the default SSL/TLS certificate.
-validate-configuration - Validates the Apache configuration (Linux only).
-php-handlers - Checks service plans and domains for unregistered PHP handlers.

 

For instance, to regenerate the configuration file of the domain “domain.com“, we use the below command.

plesk repair web domain.com

4) Plesk Repair Utility : DNS

Plesk repair utility with DNS aspect syncs the DNS zones between the DNS server and the Plesk database.

The following additional flag can be used with this aspect.

-sync-zones - Performs the synchronization without confirmation.

 

To be clear, we use the below command to sync the DNS zones.

plesk repair dns

 

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5) Plesk Repair Utility : Plesk database

Likewise, Plesk repair utility with db flag checks the consistency of the Plesk database.

If problems are identified, the Plesk repair utility creates a database dump and tries to fix the problems in the database.

There are no additional option for this aspect.

For instance, we use the below command to repair the Plesk database.

plesk repair db

 

[Want to avoid downtime due to database failures? Our Server Support Engineers are available 24/7 with quick solutions]

6) Plesk repair utility : Mysql

Plesk repair utility with Mysql aspect checks the availability of database servers and integrity of databases with database users.

Further, we use the following additional options with Mysql aspect, depending on the scenarios.

-connection - Checks that the MySQL database servers are available and can be connected.
-databases - Checks that MySQL databases created in Plesk exists on the database servers. if not, it recreate the databases.
-database-users - Checks that MySQL database users created in Plesk exist on the database servers. Also, checks database user privileges and corrects them if there are discrepancies. Also, recreates any database users that are missing.

 

For example, we use the below command to check the availability and connectivity of the database servers in Plesk.

plesk repair mysql-connection

 

This list is not complete, Plesk repair tool offers wide range of options to repair each Plesk services such as:

Plesk Repair Utility : FTP
Plesk Repair Utility : File System
Plesk Repair Utility : Microsoft SQL Server
Plesk Repair utility : Installation

Conclusion

Plesk Onyx repair utility is a great tool to diagnose and fix issues with Plesk and Plesk services. Today, we’ve discussed more on Plesk repair utility and how our Server Support Engineers use this tool to repair each services.