Hi I'm ready to start beating the crap out of some poor bastard. I'm trying to set up a Virtual server. My hosting providers is screwing me without at least a reacharound. They won't help me and keep telling me to go search the forums or pay them $75.00 per half hour to find and fix the problem I have no access to.

I'm using PLESK (Not my choice, thought I'd give it a chance) and now even as the adminstrator am locked out of all my data bases.

I get the following error:

Test connection to the database server has failed because of network problems:

Failed to connect to database: Can't connect to MySQL server on 'localhost' (10061)

I don't know what to do and my hoster won't help me unless I cough up. What do I do?

Also I have an SSL certificate but if I try to go to the IP address 72.167.160.40 or Plesk manager I get a certificate error with not reccommended to go to the site. My hosting provider says that's normal! Any idea on how to fix that as well?

Robert

I'll deal with your problems in reverse order, firstly, is your SSL certificate self-signed? i.e. not issued from a proper authority? if it is (which I suspect) then you WILL get the message that you are seeing. Until you buy a authoratitive cert from a registered provider you'll continue seeing the message.

On the side about the database, i'm assuming that the database has been set up in Plesk using the plesk database tool for it. "Create a database", and "Add User", and i'm also assuming that you have this script on the same server (hence the connecting to localhost).

Now, I realise you're working with a virtual server, so is it the case that you set up the virtual server on the machine, or your hoster set it up for you? The error 10061 is usually indicative that you have not started the MySQL daemon, or it is failing to start. Do you have root access in your virtual server? If so you can do
/sbin/service mysqld status

It might show a "locked" message, in which case you need to stop/start it again. And check your logs (/var/log/mysqld/...)

Incidently if your host was responsible for installing the services (i.e. the virtual server + mysql + apache + whatever-else) and it wasn't working to start with then it's their responsiblity to make sure it is, however if the services were installed by yourself, or they were working to start and have stopped working since, then they probably have every right to charge for support (depending on their TOS)

Setting up plesk was a combination of myself and my hosting provider. I don't know if I have root access or not, I can't seem to find it. The links you gave me don't work.

The only information that my hosting provider gave was that I have two versions of Mysql working and they didn't know which one I was talking about. Which is funny because I only set up one. and that my remote access was turned off.

I've spent hours on my plesk manager but have yet to find the mythical "remote access" control. anything that is close to it is already active.

What links? I never supplied any. Without console (ssh) access you're going to find it rather hard to debug this problem. Contact your provider saying you want all the login details for your VPS, as in "root access for your VPS", once you have that you can browse to the paths that I specified (they were paths NOT links).

Now if they say you can't have root access, ask why not? It is a VPS right? Or are you interpreting the words "virtual server" differently from myself? How did you "set up" plesk if you didn't have root (SSH) access?

I cancelled the plesk and when I made a formal complaint they finally told me all I needed to fix the problem.

The problem was they wanted the $75.00 per half hour to fix a problem they created.

Anyways I switched to cpanel and linux and had some problems that they still couldn't fix but oddly enough no one asked for the $75.00 per half hour this time. They just got angry. What they asked me to do didn't work.

After I reprovisioned the server and was setting it up again they told me what to do, but since everything was working fine there was no need to. I've since learned how to fix one problem in WHS when the "Unactivated License File" shows it's ugly head.

Which only seems to happen when I add an Ip address, one that I don't have to pay for.

Thanks for the help.