So I’ve been asked to contribute to the blog so all of our customers, current and future, can see what sort of persons work here at Webintellects. Anyone who’s put in tickets or called has likely talked to me before, I’m David. I’m a 23 year old resident of Vista, CA with a BS in Computer Networking & Security. I’ve been working at WI for about a year now. Aside from that, I’m a rather large geek, as is typical. 
I’ve been assigned to write about some of my semi-extracurricular activities that I do in my spare time that relate to the company. In this case, this would be through the IRC channel of ##Plesk located on the IRC network Freenode (irc.freenode.net). This is a sort of unofficial Plesk channel where people can come to ask about issues they have with Plesk or general questions, such as “if I install this will it break something” or “does Plesk work with this package”. And as is the course for IRC, there’s often a lot of general banter about miscellaneous things and items relating to Plesk that aren’t necessarily on-topic.
So, why do I do it? You might be asking yourself ‘why does he work on something related to work but doesn’t get paid for’? That’s a good question, and the answer is simple. It helps me learn. I see new problems and questions appear that I don’t ask and I can assist with the troubleshooting to see what causes this component to fail, or what bugs exist when you mix these two packages together. It also gives me a place to throw my own questions into the fracas if I encounter a problem that I’ve never seen before and the other staff present don’t know how to solve. For instance, a while ago some customers on one of our shared servers would’ve experienced issues trying to get Sitebuilder to publish webpages, with Sitebuilder throwing errors back about how SQLite wasn’t installed. This was due to the uninstallation of that package when we used an updater to update the server’s PHP from 4 to 5, a dependency error forced us to uninstall the package. I worked with the update provider (who hangs out in ##Plesk, he’s one of the founders of SWsoft!) to get the packages pushed forward, installed them, and all was fixed.
Plesk is not the only item we talk about. We talk about other Parallels products, like Virtuozzo, which we use for our VPS Hosting. Various questions get asked there like how to migrate people under different circumstances, about different kinds of virtualization software and how to tweak Virtuozzo so it performs better. We also throw around questions like if we modify this on a server running in a virtual environment, will it break and if so, how can we modify it without the server breaking?
Tags: VPS Hosting