Configuring Plesk to Run Behind a Firewall

If you are running Plesk behind a firewall, you might encounter certain problems with resolution of domain names served by Plesk: when you set up a new DNS domain in Plesk, its zone file includes a resource record that associates the domain name with the IP address your Plesk server is on, i.e. an internal network address like 192.168.1.1. As the 192.168.x.x IP addresses are reserved by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for use by private networks, this domain name will not be accessible to the Internet users. To work around this, you would have to associate this domain name with the IP address of the firewall machine in the domain's zone file (Domains > domain name > DNS).

We recommend using the DNS zone template (Server > DNS) to automate association of the newly added domain names with appropriate IP addresses.

Let's consider setting up a Plesk server running on 192.168.1.1 in a private network protected by a firewall, which is running on 11.22.33.44:

1. Click the Server shortcut in the navigation pane.
2. Click the DNS icon under the Services group.
3. Locate all resource records of A type. As you cannot edit any of these records, you should delete them and then create the new records: be sure to leave the values in the Name column unchanged for each A record, but replace the <ip> templates in the Value column with the IP address of your firewall host - 11.22.33.44.
4. Configure your firewall so as to ensure the proper address translation.