Having just completed a rescue job on a customer’s Plesk 9 server, all of the files in /var/www/vhosts had incorrect permissions on them resulting in visitors to any of the domains receiving a 403 Permission Denied error. The Plesk disaster recoveryKB article (KB 112699) has a section on fixing ownership of transferred files (step 9) but nothing on fixing vhost permissions.

The Parallels knowledgebase has this article (KB 6572) on restoring permissions on ONE domain, but that’s not all that helpful when you need to restore permissions on EVERY domain on the server. Plesk Windows users get the ability to batch “Check Permissions” in the control panel interface, but Linux users get no such love.

Instead, you can execute the following (as root!) to reset the permissions for every virtual host on the server:

# mysql -uadmin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` -Dpsa -Ns -e”select domains.name, sys_users.login as username from domains left join hosting on domains.id=hosting.dom_id left join sys_users on hosting.sys_user_id=sys_users.id left join accounts on  sys_users.account_id=accounts.id where htype=’vrt_hst’;” | awk ‘{print “/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/vhostmng —install-vhost —vhost-name=” $1 ” —user-name=” $2 ” —set-content-permissions”}’ | sh -x

It should be noted that I have only tested this on a 9.x server but I think the psa database structure is similar on 10.x so you may find this works for you. The trickiest part of this was figuring out how to get a listing of virtual host domains mapped to system users out of the psa database as the schema is a bit convoluted – hat tip to rackerbox.com for having something I could adapt.