Open Source Helpdesk Software

I was looking around for some helpdesk software for just me to use to help me organize my tasks. I came across a few different solutions.

OTRS: This is the one that I ended up with. It is perl based, has many enterprise type features, and seems to be updated quite frequently. Another plus is that it has it's own ubuntu package, making it very easy to install. I did run across one bug during the installation where I just had to aptitude the libperl apache module.

OneOrZero: At first glance this appeared to be the one that I wanted. I tested it out and found a few bugs in a short amount of time. On top of that, it looks as though their free version isn't supported any more.

eTicket: This was actually my second choice after OneOrZero. I decided not to go with this php based software because there seem to be some big changes with their managment. I may go back later and look at this though.

Upgrade Fedora Core Through Yum

I just went through upgrading an old machine that wasn't really doing much but didn't want to lose the setup. Found a pretty simple guide that helped me get through it painlessly. Maybe that link can help a few people out.

Recently there was a bug added to the formatting. Hopefully they will fix that soon.

Red5...just $%@*& work

Disclaimer: The title is just what I was thinking when I came up with compiler errors.

Well Red5 is turning out to be a great product and the price can't be beat. Like any software, though, there are a few bugs that need to be worked out. The biggest thing standing in it's path is a totally broken 0.7.0 release that won't even work out of the box. It's okay though, after searching around for a long while, I came across a fix from their bug reporting system.

It basically involves going back to the working ivy from the 0.6.3 release by replacing the ivy library jar in the lib folder, downloading a revised build.xml and ivyconfig.xml and placing them in your base installation directory, and then building with and. It may seem like an easy fix but I would think they wouldn't let this release out if you can't even run it.

I really want this software to progress so it is everything that Flash Media Server is and more (really it is more already). Just need to get those bugs worked out. So now I just want to say keep up a great project red5 guys, it's coming along great.

Update for Update for Firehol's get-iana.sh script

No, the title isn't a typo. The firehol mailing list received an update from ktsaou, the creator of firehol that the update had already been implemented in the CVS. I just wish that the changes would actually make it to release instead of just sitting inside of a CVS that seemingly no one checks. Enough of my little rant. If you want the updated version, you can get it from the CVS.

Update for Firehol's get-iana.sh script

I didn't notice very quickly but it was brought to my attention through the mailing list for firehol that the IANA Reserved IPs list formatting was updated. So I went through and did a little update to get it working again. This isn't 100% tested so use at your own risk.

#!/bin/bash

# $Id: get-iana.sh,v 1.11 2008/05/02 23:38:31 bdewong Exp $
#
# $Log: get-iana.sh,v $
#
# Revision 1.11 2008/05/02 23:38:31 bdewong
# Updated parsing of ipv4-address-space
#
# Revision 1.10  2007/05/05 23:38:31  ktsaou
# Added support for external definitions of:
#
# RESERVED_IPS
# PRIVATE_IPS
# MULTICAST_IPS
# UNROUTABLE_IPS
#
# in files under the same name in /etc/firehol/.
# Only RESERVED_IPS is mandatory (firehol will complain if it is not there,
# but it will still work without it), and is also the only file that firehol
# checks how old is it. If it is 90+ days old, firehol will complain again.
#
# Changed the supplied get-iana.sh script to generate the RESERVED_IPS file.
# FireHOL also instructs the user to use this script if the file is missing
# or is too old.
#
# Revision 1.9  2007/04/29 19:34:11  ktsaou
# *** empty log message ***
#
# Revision 1.8  2005/06/02 15:48:52  ktsaou
# Allowed 127.0.0.1 to be in RESERVED_IPS
#
# Revision 1.7  2005/05/08 23:27:23  ktsaou
# Updated RESERVED_IPS to current IANA reservations.
#
# Revision 1.6  2004/01/10 18:44:39  ktsaou
# Further optimized and reduced PRIVATE_IPS using:
# http://www.vergenet.net/linux/aggregate/
#
# The supplied get-iana.sh uses 'aggregate-flim' if it finds it in the path.
# (aggregate-flim is the name of this program when installed on Gentoo)
#
# Revision 1.5  2003/08/23 23:26:50  ktsaou
# Bug #793889:
# Change #!/bin/sh to #!/bin/bash to allow FireHOL run on systems that
# bash is not linked to /bin/sh.
#
# Revision 1.4  2002/10/27 12:44:42  ktsaou
# CVS test
#

#
# Program that downloads the IPv4 address space allocation by IANA
# and creates a list with all reserved address spaces.
#

IPV4_ADDRESS_SPACE_URL="http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space"
IANA_RESERVED="IANA\|Future use"

tempfile="/tmp/iana.$$.$RANDOM"

AGGREGATE="`which aggregate-flim 2>/dev/null`"
if [ -z "${AGGREGATE}" ]
then
       echo >&2
       echo >&2
       echo >&2 "WARNING"
       echo >&2 "Please install 'aggregate-flim' to shrink the list of IPs."
       echo >&2
       echo >&2
fi

echo >&2
echo >&2 "Fetching IANA IPv4 Address Space, from:"
echo >&2 "${IPV4_ADDRESS_SPACE_URL}"
echo >&2

wget -O - --proxy=off "${IPV4_ADDRESS_SPACE_URL}"       |\
       grep -e "${IANA_RESERVED}"                      |\
       cut -d ' ' -f 1                                 |\
(
       last=-1
       while IFS="/" read range net
       do
               range=`expr $range + 0`
               net=`expr $net + 0`

               if [ ! $net -eq 8 ]
               then
                       echo >&2 "Cannot handle network masks of $net bits ($range/$net)"
                       continue
               fi
               
               if [ $range -gt $last ]
               then
                       echo "$range.0.0.0/$net"
                       last=$range
               fi
       done
) | \
(
       if [ ! -z "${AGGREGATE}" -a -x "${AGGREGATE}" ]
       then
               "${AGGREGATE}"
       else
               cat
       fi
) >"${tempfile}"

echo >&2
echo >&2
echo >&2 "FOUND THE FOLLOWING RESERVED IP RANGES:"
printf "RESERVED_IPS=\""
i=0
for x in `cat ${tempfile}`
do
       i=$[i + 1]
       printf "${x} "
done
printf "\"\n"

if [ $i -eq 0 ]
then
       echo >&2
       echo >&2
       echo >&2 "Failed to find reserved IPs."
       echo >&2 "Possibly the file format has been changed, or I cannot fetch the URL."
       echo >&2

       rm -f ${tempfile}
       exit 1
fi
echo >&2
echo >&2
echo >&2 "Differences between the fetched list and the list installed in"
echo >&2 "/etc/firehol/RESERVED_IPS:"

echo >&2 "# diff /etc/firehol/RESERVED_IPS ${tempfile}"
diff /etc/firehol/RESERVED_IPS ${tempfile}

if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
       echo >&2
       echo >&2 "No differences found."
       echo >&2

       rm -f ${tempfile}
       exit 0
fi

echo >&2
echo >&2
echo >&2 "Would you like to save this list to /etc/firehol/RESERVED_IPS"
echo >&2 "so that FireHOL will automatically use it from now on?"
echo >&2
while [ 1 = 1 ]
do
       printf >&2 "yes or no > "
       read x

       case "${x}" in
               yes)    cp -f /etc/firehol/RESERVED_IPS /etc/firehol/RESERVED_IPS.old 2>/dev/null
                       cat "${tempfile}" >/etc/firehol/RESERVED_IPS || exit 1
                       echo >&2 "New RESERVED_IPS written to '/etc/firehol/RESERVED_IPS'."
                       break
                       ;;

               no)
                       echo >&2 "Saved nothing."
                       break
                       ;;

               *)      echo >&2 "Cannot understand '${x}'."
                       ;;
       esac
done

rm -f ${tempfile}

Skip Annoying OpenOffice Registration Screen

I just wanted to post about a helpful tip that I came across to skip the registration wizard in OpenOffice.org when installing from an administrative install point. Edit the setup.xcu file in "OpenOfficeInstallDirectory\share\registry\res\en-US\org\openoffice\setup.xcu" to look like the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<oor:component-data oor="http://openoffice.org/2001/registry" xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" name="Setup" package="org.openoffice">
<node name="L10N">
<prop name="ooLocale" type="xs:string">
 <value>en-US</value>
</prop>
</node>
<node name="Office">
<prop name="LicenseAcceptDate" type="xs:string">
 <value>2008-04-29T06:44:17</value>
</prop>
<prop name="MigrationCompleted" type="xs:boolean">
 <value>true</value>
</prop>
<prop name="FirstStartWizardCompleted" type="xs:boolean">
 <value>true</value>
</prop>
<node name="Factories">
 <node name="com.sun.star.text.TextDocument">
  <prop name="ooSetupFactoryWindowAttributes" type="xs:string">
   <value>48,67,952,723;4;0,0,0,0;</value>
  </prop>
 </node>
 <node name="com.sun.star.sheet.SpreadsheetDocument">
  <prop name="ooSetupFactoryWindowAttributes" type="xs:string">
   <value>180,199,952,723;4;0,0,0,0;</value>
  </prop>
 </node>
 <node name="com.sun.star.drawing.DrawingDocument">
  <prop name="ooSetupFactoryWindowAttributes" type="xs:string">
   <value>246,265,952,723;4;0,0,0,0;</value>
  </prop>
 </node>
 <node name="com.sun.star.text.WebDocument">
  <prop name="ooSetupFactoryWindowAttributes" type="xs:string">
   <value>139,194,952,723;1;0,0,0,0;</value>
  </prop>
 </node>
 <node name="com.sun.star.presentation.PresentationDocument">
  <prop name="ooSetupFactoryWindowAttributes" type="xs:string">
   <value>92,111,952,723;4;0,0,0,0;</value>
  </prop>
 </node>
 <node name="com.sun.star.frame.StartModule">
  <prop name="ooSetupFactoryWindowAttributes" type="xs:string">
   <value>136,155,952,723;4;0,0,0,0;</value>
  </prop>
 </node>
</node>
</node>
</oor:component-data>

Flash and client audio recording

Recently, I have been looking at recording audio from an embedded flash program and encoding that onto a server. There are so many different resources out there that it can be confusing. I just wanted to share some of the free and/or open source tools that I have found out there. Please feel free to share any tools that you use.

• Red5 (Flash Media Server Alternative):
  

  Red5 is an Open Source Flash Server written in Java that supports:
  

  • Streaming Audio/Video (FLV and MP3)
  
  
  • Recording Client Streams (FLV only)
  
  
  • Shared Objects
  
  
  • Live Stream Publishing
  
  
  • Remoting (AMF)
  
  
  
  



• ffmpeg (Media Encoder):
  FFmpeg is a complete solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec, the leading audio/video codec library. FFmpeg is developed under Linux, but it can compiled under most operating systems, including Windows.



• Audacity (Audio Recorder/Editor):
  Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.

OpenOffice.org is better than Microsoft Office

Well, that is not really true. You still have to consider the type of user that will be using the office suite.

Your typical home user will probably find OpenOffice.org (hereon referred to as OpenOffice) sufficient in everything they have to do. Sure there is a learning curve if they are used to using Microsoft Office, but for the price you really can't beat it. So what is the price? It's free. Yes, that's right, it is open source software created by hardworking people to share with the world. It allows add-ons and extensions as well (although I don't believe many basic users would use this feature.)

But what about in an office setting? That is where my first experience with OpenOffice comes into play. In an office full of Nurses, Caregivers, and other Administrative staff. This is where I believe that Microsoft Office shines and OpenOffice falls short. With so many different staff members performing different duties, everyone uses the office suite differently. Many of them are also using Microsoft Office at home. Some of them don't even use computers at home and what little word processing experience they have, came from Microsoft Office many years ago. Now, the staff members are busy people without time to learn a new piece of software and that's to be expected. They have duties totally different from an IT or computer guy. Then support is a key issue. You need to have someone around that can occasionally show people how to do certain things. Sure the same thing can be said for Microsoft Office, but I have probably had 10-15 times more questions with OpenOffice.

The next problem I have come across in the office setting is deployment through GPO (group policy objects.) I don't know why it is made so difficult to get a proper GPO installation and MSI transform setup for OpenOffice. What I had to do was to scour the Internet looking for MSI settings (or setup settings) that I could change to get it to install without causing headaches for our staff. The first thing I ran into was an article telling me I could edit the XML file in the administrative installation folder. Well it seems that route was deprecated and they made it more difficult to edit. In the end, I had to use Microsoft's Orca software to create a transform. To make a long story short, I spent days configuring and testing the settings just right to get it to install, not create different versions in different directories, not to have first start wizard pop up and people call me when they don't know what to do with it, and to get it to associate with .doc, .ppt, and .xls files correctly. With Microsoft Office, I can use their Custom Installation Wizard to create perfect installs that don't have any annoyances.

So, I have come to the conclusion that neither OpenOffice nor Microsoft Office is better than the other, just different. With non-computer savvy people (the ones that don't want to be hassled with getting to learn new software), I would recommend Microsoft Office for it's ease of use and flexibility. But for some users (the ones that like to experiment and LOVE saving money) OpenOffice is great. Oh, it is also great for the small office that can't afford 30 licenses for Microsoft Office but can afford to have their IT guy solve everyone's problems.

P.S. the picture comes from deleket @ deviantart.com

Playing around with the template

Well today I was playing around with the template to get it to display code better and what you see is the final result. I don't know if anyone will want it but I have uploaded it to google docs.

If you are interested in the template, you can display code by doing the following in the html:

<pre>
Code goes here
</pre>

Blog Updates and Imagick Help

I have decided to turn my personal blog around and try and focus on some tech "stuff" as it will relate more to my current work.

Recently I found some interesting new tools to work with in PHP.
The first one is Imagemagick and the php plugin, Imagick, written partially by Mikko Koppanen. I will be using this to create previews of PDFs and other files for users to download.

Another interesting tool I have yet to mess around with is ezComponents. I found a reference to this site through Mikkos size. I will use this to make some nice looking graphs that will display stats.

I did find some functions to use in pdt/php ide on the eclipse site written by Nico Ehinger which I republished in plain text on google docs. I have also updated them and it should have all the current functions and constants but no comments or default values, available on google docs.

The following is the code I used to generate the last file:

isInternal() ? 'internal' : 'user-defined',
     $class->isAbstract() ? ' abstract' : '',
     $class->isFinal() ? ' final' : '',
     $class->isInterface() ? 'interface' : 'class',
     $class->getName(),
     var_export($class->getParentClass(), 1),
     $class->getFileName(),
     $class->getStartLine(),
     $class->getEndline()
);

echo "class " . $class->getName() . " {\n\n";

// Print class methods
echo "//Functions\n";
$methods = $class->getMethods();
foreach ($methods as $method) {
$class_method = new ReflectionMethod($method->class, $method->name);

$parameters = $class_method->getParameters();
$params = array();
foreach ($parameters as $parameter) {
$param_string = '$' . $parameter->getName();
if ($parameter->isPassedByReference()) $param_string = '&' . $param_string;
if ($parameter->isOptional() && $parameter->isDefaultValueAvailable())
 $param_string .= ' = '.$parameter->getDefaultValue();
$params[] .= $param_string;
}
$method_params = implode(', ', $params);

//Comments Section
echo "\n\t/**\n";
foreach ($params as $i) {
echo "\t* @param $i\n";
}
if (!count($params)) echo "\t*\n";
echo "\t*/\n";

printf(
 "\t%s%s%s%s%s%s function %s ( %s ) {}\n" ,
     $class_method->isAbstract() ? ' abstract' : '',
     $class_method->isFinal() ? ' final' : '',
     $class_method->isPublic() ? ' public' : '',
     $class_method->isPrivate() ? ' private' : '',
     $class_method->isProtected() ? ' protected' : '',
     $class_method->isStatic() ? ' static' : '',
     $class_method->getName(),
     $method_params
);
}

echo "\n}\n\n";

// Print class constants
echo "//Constants\n";
foreach ($class->getConstants() as $constant_name => $constant_value) {
echo "define('".$class->getName()."::$constant_name', $constant_value);\n";
}
?>