Today I had to regain access to the admin panel of one of my root servers that uses Plesk as administrative panel. I had configured a IP restriction for the panel under Tools and Settings > Restrict Administrative Access. The problem was, that I wanted to access the machine from outside of the company network (my home). In general that would be no big deal. I could use my VPN access as a tunnel. But somehow the outgoing IP had changed for VPN users (I have no idea why at the moment). That’s why I had to take the following steps to regain access to the admin panel from my private  IP address.
Regain access to the admin panel of Plesk
These steps where necessary to regain access to the admin panel:
- Login to the machine using ssh
- Get an MySQL session:
$> MYSQL_PWD=`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` mysql -u admin psa
This line loads the MySQL password from the shadow file and starts a MySQL commandline session for the Plesk database.
- Set the access policy to allow:
MariaDB [psa]> UPDATE misc SET val="allow" WHERE param='access_policy'
That’s it! Afterwards you should be able to login into the Plesk admin panel again.
I strongly recommend to finally activate the IP restriction again and add all necessary IP addresses to the whitelist.
Further information on how to regain access to the admin panel
What brought me to this solution, was an this article from the official Plesk Help Center:
https://support.plesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/213906225
There is also described, how to do all theses steps under Microsoft Windows Servers.
More interesting articles about Plesk and Linux can be found here: