Plesk Integration

Integrate Open-Xchange with Plesk

WORK IN PROGRESS

This document describes how to integrate Open-Xchange with Plesk.

Requirements

In order to integrate Open-Xchange with Plesk, the Open-Xchange APS package must be used. This requires the following versions of Plesk and the APS package:

• Open-Xchange APS package version 7.2 and above (Not yet available).
• Parallels Plesk Panel version 11.5 and above

Older versions are not supported.

Download

Download the APS package from the APS catalogue

Install and configure Open-Xchange

Before you continue, you have to find out your requirements on how to integrate your Plesk instance(s) with Open-Xchange. There are two possible scenarios:

One Open-Xchange installation for one Plesk Installation

You want to serve one Plesk system with one single Open-Xchange installation or you are the only one managing the Plesk servers.

One Open-Xchange installation for many Plesk systems (Reseller Mode)

You want to resell many Plesk systems but only use one single Open-Xchange installation.

Note: Finding the correct scenario is important as it is hard to change later!

The main problem is, that usually on Open-Xchange, you have ONE single "root" account to provision contexts/tenants in Open-Xchange. The name of this account is usually oxadminmaster, but it can be renamed to what ever you like. Now imagine there's a scenario where not you, but your customers should create contexts. This is usually the case when you are a reseller. In this case you do not want to hand out that single "root" account to all your customers.

Fortunately, Open-Xchange has a solution for that. It is called the Reseller_Bundle.

Roughly summarised, if you are a Reseller you most likely need one to many setup.

DNS and Mail settings

Keep in mind that Open-Xchange will use the mail server as provided by Plesk to access mail. For that reason, the Open-Xchange system must have access to the same DNS settings as the individual Plesk systems have. That means that when one Plesk system has a mail domain example.com configured using the mail servers hostname mail.example.com, Open-Xchange must be able to resolve the same name to be that Plesk system. The Open-Xchange APS package will hand over these names to the Open-Xchange backend when provisioning Open-Xchange accounts.

SOAP Settings

Every Plesk system must be able to access at least one Open-Xchange server via SOAP. That means that you have to allow access from every Plesk system to the SOAP provisioning system. This can be configured via apache configuration. When you followed our guides, that will be in the file /etc/apache2/conf.d/proxy_http.conf on Debian or /etc/httpd/conf.d/proxy_http.conf in Redhat based systems. It might look like this

<Location /webservices>
   # restrict access to the soap provisioning API
   Order Deny,Allow
   Deny from all
   Allow from 127.0.0.1 192.168 172.16.1.2
</Location>

which would allow access to the SOAP provisioning on the network 192.168 and on the single hosts 127.0.0.1 and 172.16.1.2

One Open-Xchange installation for one Plesk Installation

Follow one of the Open-Xchange installation guides to install Open-Xchange and in addition, install the following package:

open-xchange-parallels

Now follow the instructions as written here Plesk_Integration#Plesk_Configuration. In this case, the Reseller Mode has to be kept off, which is the default of the APS package. The Master Administrator login is the Open-Xchange "root" account.

One Open-Xchange installation for many Plesk systems (Reseller Mode)

Follow one of the Open-Xchange installation guides to install Open-Xchange and in addition, install the following package:

open-xchange-parallels open-xchange-admin-soap-reseller

Create and manage subadmin accounts

As explained in more details in the article about the Reseller Bundle, you have to create subadmins that you can hand over to your individual Plesk customers/resellers. This article explains on how to do that using the command line as provided by Open-Xchange. Of course the same management can be done via SOAP and via RMI.

After you finished setting up Open-Xchange including the initialisation of the restrictions, you are ready to create a subadmin account. This article assumes that your "root" account name in Open-Xchange is oxadminmaster and it's password is secret. Please do NOT use this password in your environment!

Lets create two new admin accounts:

$ /opt/open-xchange/sbin/createadmin -A oxadminmaster -P secret -u pleskcustomer1 -p secret -d "My first customer"
$ /opt/open-xchange/sbin/createadmin -A oxadminmaster -P secret -u pleskcustomer2 -p secret -d "My second customer"

The login of these customers are pleskcustomer1 and pleskcustomer2, both receive the same password secret - again, do not use this password in production.

Now to list these accounts, run

$ /opt/open-xchange/sbin/listadmin -A oxadminmaster -P secret
Id Name           Displayname        Parent Restrictions
39 pleskcustomer1 My first customer  0
40 pleskcustomer2 My second customer 0

You can apply restrictions to these accounts as well. We can for example create a third user, which is only allowed to create 100 contexts:

$ /opt/open-xchange/sbin/createadmin -A oxadminmaster -P secret -u pleskcustomer3 -p secret -d "My third customer" \
   -a Subadmin.MaxContext=100

$ /opt/open-xchange/sbin/listadmin -A oxadminmaster -P secret
Id Name           Displayname        Parent Restrictions
39 pleskcustomer1 My first customer  0
40 pleskcustomer2 My second customer 0
41 pleskcustomer3 My third customer  0      Subadmin.MaxContext=100

Please refer to the Reseller Bundle documentation for more restrictions and further details.

Manage Contexts created via Open-Xchange APS package in Plesk

See Plesk_Integration#Plesk_Configuration_.28Admin_Role.29 below on how customers create contexts via Plesk. This article assumes we are having a Plesk WebMaster account named john@example.com. Once that user installed the application for the domain example.com, we will see the following:

$ /opt/open-xchange/sbin/listcontext -A oxadminmaster -P secret
cid fid fname        enabled qmax qused name              lmappings                                CustomID         Owner
19  2   19_ctx_store true    1024     0 pleskcustomer1_24 pleskcustomer1_24,BRANDING||24||[...]                     pleskcustomer1

You can see, that we assigned the subadmin pleskcustomer1 to this Plesk instances owner. In addition, the name of the context has been generated as pleskcustomer1_24. This is happening in the Reseller Mode only. When this mode is turned off, the context name is the context id.

Note: The output is not very readable to to the fact that the Open-Xchange makes intensive use of the lmappings. If you want to have a more readable list, you could use the --csv option and import the result into a spreadsheet.

General Open-Xchange Configuration

Add the parameter

com.openexchange.login.formLoginWithoutAuthId=true

to /opt/open-xchange/etc/login.properties

Plesk Configuration (Admin Role)

Add Application via Application Vault

Check version requirement

Check that the version of the APS package is at least 7.2. Older versions are neither supported nor will they work in all circumstances.

Set up the Open-Xchange package

Plesk Configuration (Webmaster Role)

Once the Plesk Admin installed and configured the Open-Xchange APS package, you can e.g. assign a user the Webmaster role to install that application into one or more domains.

Understanding the Open-Xchange specific configuration data

Creating Webmail users

In the same configuration as shown above, existing mail accounts can be created as a webmail user. Once created in to Open-Xchange, the list of existing mail accounts will have a small Open-Xchange icon displayed for users, that have been created into Open-Xchange. Via a click on that icon, you can directly access Open-Xchange Webmail on behalf of that user.

Debugging

Plesk

Plesk errors can be found in /usr/local/psa/admin/logs/panel.log. If you turn on Debug mode in the APS package settings, you see even more information, but do NOT turn it on in production permanently.

To have even more information, do the following on your Plesk system:

$ cd /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/
$ mv panel.ini.sample panel.ini

and set

[log]
filter.priority = 7

Open-Xchange

Open-Xchange errors can usually be found in /var/log/open-xchange/open-xchange.log.0.