Hacking Plesk 8 for FreeBSD 6

I was recently in a situation where I had to upgrade Plesk, commercial domain-hosting software that lets you manage web, email, and database services through a nice web control panel. It's pretty convenient software and it seems to work well. I needed to migrate the service off an old RedHat box that was difficult to maintain, and I wanted the new system on FreeBSD. The latest Plesk release, 8.0, is only supported on FreeBSD up to version 6.0, but the most current release at the time was 6.1. I like to track RELENG_6 and I didn't want to downgrade the box, so I tried faking out the Plesk installer.

To do that, I changed /usr/src/sys/conf/newvers.sh. REVISION="6.1" became REVISION="6.0" and BRANCH="STABLE" became BRANCH="STABLE61". Modifying the BRANCH label wasn't strictly necessary, but it seemed wise to identify the true release in the kernel version data. After that, I simply rebuilt and reinstalled the kernel (see /usr/src/Makefile if you're unfamiliar with the process), rebooted, and the Plesk installer worked without a hitch.

I've been told by SWSoft support that Plesk 8.1 will support newer releases of FreeBSD 6, but I couldn't wait for that and I wasn't about to build a new box on FreeBSD 4 or 5. (They're not bad, but I prefer 6 now.) I haven't had any troubles running Plesk 8 on that system, and as one who's more comfortable with FreeBSD than RedHat, I've been much happier managing this newer box.