Why the heck is Plesk trying to login to 127.0.0.1 on port 11444?

Alright, this drove me nuts for quite some time, so I figured I'd share. I'd been working on Plesk for quite some time, and took a quick run to the store. When I came back, for some odd reason whenever I tried to log into https://[myserver]:8443, the header would work, but then I'd get a message stating that it couldn't reach port 11444 on 127.0.0.1. For those who don't know, 127.0.0.1 is your own computer - what's known as a loopback address. So the fact that it couldn't connect to my own computer made perfect sense. Perfect sense or no, it was still preventing me from getting my system to work properly.

Prior to this, I had changed my hostname, but certainly hadn't set it to 127.0.0.1. So checking in my /etc/hosts file,I saw this:

127.0.0.1      my     localhost

Now, I know what the "localhost" meant, but what the heck was "my"? Then I remembered that's what I used for my subdomain. Somehow, Plesk had determined that since it was in my /etc/hosts, it could use it in its configs. It was "helping".

So I started poking around in the MySQL database, and I found that in the psa database, in the misc table, the entry "sso_relay" was set to "https://127.0.0.1:11444". BINGO. This is exactly what I needed to change. If you know how to do that, go for it. If not, once you log in via command-line, you can issue these commands:

use psa;
update misc set val='https://[your_server_name]:11444' where param='sso_relay'

That's it! You don't even need to restart the psa service, it should just work after that. I'm still digging to make sure I haven't overlooked anything, but so far so good!