osTicket theme 1.6 RC4

As you already know osTicket is a support ticket system which is very easy to use and free. Developers from osTicket are back, they fixed a few bugs and cleaned a little bit most of the code.

Features:

  • Multilanguage client interface: You can add as many languages as you want for the client side.
  • Error messages can be “catched” and identified by a unique MD5 key which you can translate it in your language file.
  • You can configure the Ticket ID field to be a password field or just a text field for “security”.
  • It comes with 2 cool, light and fully XHTML valid themes which you can easily modify colors and also the HTML because of it’s clean design.
  • It has a built-in CAPTCHA module that will protect you from SPAM.
  • Search tickets based only on ticket’s subject.
  • Easy to install.
  • Last but not least, it’s 100% free, but that doesn’t mean you are allowed to remove credits 😉

It has been tested a while now but it’s still on a beta stage, however, you might find some bugs and I’ll be happy to get some feedback from you. I didn’t include the Spanish language file this time, but I’ll do it someday 🙂 If you want to translate it to other language feel free to send me your language file and I’ll include it in the next release 😉

Here are some screenshots:

This specific version is a patched one from Nov/30/2010 which includes all the post-install instructions here, spanish translation included and all the patches needed to work with osTicket 1.6.0 (Stable), get it here: Download [download#4]

*** This is still very old news, keeping them there just for the archives ***

Are you still reading? Ok, you deserve it… Download [download#1] (Compatible with 1.6 RC5)
Necesitas el tema en español? Descarga el archivo [download#2]

When you uncompress the file it will create a directory called “client”, that directory should be copied to osTicket’s root dir and the rest of the installation instructions are in the README file, have fun!

** Post install notes and bug fix:

  • The file thankyou.inc.php from this template has a code error in line 10: $ctlang->docatch($msg?) which should be changed for $ctlang->docatch($msg)?
  • Inside osTicket’s root dir, edit the index.php and comment (or delete) all the html code in order to see the template display correctly, then you just need to add this line before the footer in included: require(CLIENTINC_DIR.’main.inc.php’);. This bug and others will be fixed in the next release soon.

Install and setup Samba in Linux

What is Samba? If you don’t know what it is then you shouldn’t be reading this 😉 Samba can do a lot of things and we are only cover a basic configuration that will allow you to share specific folders on a Linux machine in the same way you share forlder in a Windows machine.

This will cover a very quick installation and setup of Samba on any Linux flavor, however in this particular case I’ll cover CentOS 5.2

First you need to install Samba’s binaries using yum 🙂 (you can use apt-get or up2date if you want)

yum install samba samba-common

Installation stage has been covered, that was fast 😉 Now we need to do a basic configuration in order to start using it and we need to design a structure… let’s say I want to setup a Linux machine to share a specific folder to everyone with read-only access and a specific folder for only local user with read/write access, so here we go:

cd /etc/samba
mv smb.conf smb.conf.backup
nano smb.conf

And paste the following configuration on the new smb.conf

[global]
netbios name = sambaserver
load printers = no
path = /home
default service = global
security = share
available = no

[share]
path = /var/ftp/pub
guest ok = yes
read only = yes
comment = Public Access
available = yes

[sambademo]
path = /home/demo
guest ok = no
writable = yes
valid users = demo
comment = User demo home
available = yes

So far we have setup a basic global configuration, a public access area and a restricted area for a local user called “demo”. Before we continue you need to make sure the folder /var/ftp/pub exists. Now, before we start our new Samba server, we need to setup the “demo” account and it can be done in 2 ways:

useradd -s /sbin/nologin demo
smbpaswd -a demo

If we don’t want to give this user shell access, or…

useradd -s /bin/bash demo
passwd demo
smbpasswd -a demo

If we want to give this user access to shell and of course we need to set the same password for the system and Samba.
It is time to start our Samba server:

/etc/init.d/smb start

Now let’s try it, on Windows do the following: Start -> Run -> cmd

net use y:\\samba_server_ip\share
net use z:\\samba_server_ip\demo /user:demo thepasswordyouset

Hopefully you will see you have 2 new units on your Windows File Explorer, Y which is a read-only folder and Z which is a read/write folder 🙂 that’s all!

If you want to do more things with Samba and you are lazy you can always get Webmin and use its module to configure Samba and use its advanced options.

NOTE: This article is for educational purposes and should be treated as it is.

Troubleshooting:

  • The network name cannot be found: Check your computer’s firewall or if your ADSL/DSL modem, sometimes by default they block all outgoing connections to Netbios port which is 139.
  • Anything else check your log files /var/log/samba/smb.log 🙂

Literature: (Thanks to them, this tutorial exists)
Sunny Walia
Joel Barrios Dueñas
Samba