If youвЂ™re a hosting provider or a customer on a shared hosting account hereвЂ™s what needs to be done and we have some options: Change the SSH access from chrooted to plain вЂol /bin/bash/. If youвЂ™re on a VPS or Dedicated server letвЂ™s make this really easy. In all reality this should only apply to your shared hosting accounts and they shouldnвЂ™t be running too many tasks!! Anyone with a VPS account or Dedicated server should not have this issue and if they do then there may just be an answer below! So now that we know that this is an issue and that Plesk hasnвЂ™t made any effort to correct it, after months of people crying about it, letвЂ™s look at what we can do to work around it. Well itвЂ™s not if youвЂ™re a hosting provider and have the resources to modify cron jobs for your customers. I said earlier that this isnвЂ™t necessarily that bad. Okay, easy enough we can just specify /etc/php.ini and then it will know where php is вЂ¦ right? Well no. If you upgraded to Parallels Plesk Panel 10.1 from previous versions (including 10.0), then the chrooted shell is not automatically selected so as not to break execution of any scheduled tasks that your customers could have running.ДЄlthough that sounds fine and dandy, plesk has fubarred this one! As of current (12/30/11) chrooted tasks result in -: php: command not found. This is the default setting applied on clean installations of Panel 10.1 and in cases when data were migrated from other platforms or earlier Plesk versions. Starting from Parallels Plesk Panel 10.1, execution of cron tasks is automatically restricted to the chrooted shell environment. This allowed them to gain access to the data that could be potentially used to compromise the server. In previous versions of Plesk, the users who were granted the permission to schedule tasks with cron but were not allowed access to server shell, could still run scripts in the shell under which the cron was running. So letвЂ™s take a look at why we have this issue to better understand the problem.

ThereвЂ™s a simple fix for this which really doesnвЂ™t seem too bad. Plesk has screwed cron jobs up for hosting providers that want to allow users access to a chrooted environment. Are you a hosting provider or a user using Plesk 10.1 or above and need to allow Plesk cron jobs (tasks) while chrooted? WeвЂ™ll youвЂ™re not alone!