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What is Plesk Screenshot Service?

Anton Kuznetsov
Updated
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Question

What is Plesk Screenshot Service?

Answer

Plesk Screenshot Service takes screenshots of websites in Plesk to be displayed in the Plesk interface.

Requests to the sites made by this Service can be determined by the custom User-Agent header: Plesk screenshot bot.

It is possible to disable the Screenshot Service on the Plesk instance at any moment by adding the following lines to the "panel.ini" file:

CONFIG_TEXT: [screenshotService]
url = ''

Plesk screenshot bot does not have a fixed IP address. Currently, it uses IP addresses from eu-west-1 region in AWS, IP ranges can be found here:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/aws-ip-ranges.html

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Comments

7 comments
Date Votes
  • Avatar
    LRob.fr Web Hosting

    Can we know Plesk screenshot bot IPs in order to make sure we don't accidentally block them with fail2ban?

    Can we use our own screenshot service? If so, which ones may be compatible?

    1
  • Avatar
    Alban Staehli

    Knowing IPs being used by the screenshot bot/service would be great for whitelisting.

    0
  • Avatar
    Hemply Made

    Can Plesk submit information to CloudFlare for verified bots? I'm still having an issue and can't seem to make any custom rules that allows the bot to take a screenshot and me to access Plesk admin dashboard at the same time.

    0
  • Avatar
    Niels van der Velden

    Why does this have to be an external agent? If it's just for taking screenshots for internal use I don't understand why it could not be done from our server's own ip address? Or am I missing something?

    1
  • Avatar
    LRob.fr Web Hosting
    (Edited )

    I couldn't agree more Niels van der Velden , it would also save up bandwidth and servers and power consumption… Imagine the energy waste juste because of this remote feature…

    I would assume this is remote as it is easier to manage than installing a headless web client with GUI rendering on all servers, are these usually have weird architectures and install methods.

    BTW, 9 months in, still don't know which IPs to whitelist or which alternative screenshot server we may setup…

    0
  • Avatar
    Petr Soudsky
    (Edited )

    I ran into the Plesk Screenshot Bot and found a few IPs commonly associated with it (AWS EU-West instances, so not guaranteed static, may change over time). Posting in case it helps someone debugging firewall or access logs:

    3.253.233.200
    3.255.74.69
    3.254.197.96
    3.254.211.76
    54.171.209.67
    34.245.236.147
    3.253.195.123
    3.249.92.52
    34.245.234.31

    Source: https://udger.com/resources/ua-list/bot-detail?bot=Plesk+Bot

    0
  • Avatar
    Petr Soudsky

    Quick update in case it helps someone else:

    I found another IP used by the Plesk Screenshot Bot in our WAF logs: 3.250.162.85

    On our server the screenshot service was blocked before it even reached the webserver. After whitelisting this IP, the Plesk Screenshot feature immediately started working again.

    IPs seem to rotate (AWS), so checking your WAF logs for blocked Amazon addresses is worth doing. Hope this saves someone some time.

    0

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