Setup Web-based Help Desk System Using SiT! On Debian 7 Wheezy

SiT!, Support Incident Tracker, is a Free, Open Source web based ‘Help Desk’ or ‘Support Ticket System’ application which uses PHP and MySQL for tracking technical support calls/emails. SiT! can be used to manage contacts, sites, technical support contracts and support incidents in one place. Also we can send emails directly from SiT!, attach files and record every communication in the incident log. SiT is aware of Service Level Agreements and incidents are flagged if they stray outside of them.

Features

– Web based, easy to install, configure and use.
– Configurable service levels (SLA’s).
– Tracks all inbound and outbound emails.
– LDAP Integration (Support for Active Directory, eDirectory, openLDAP).
– Support for over 19+ languages.

Prerequisites

You should have a working LAMP installation in your Debian server. Please follow the below link to install LAMP server in Debian 7 Wheezy.

>>> Install LAMP (Apache, MySQL And PHP) On Debian 7 ‘Wheezy’

Also make sure that you have installed the following php extensions.

– MySQL
– PCRE
– Session
– Zlib
– xml
– IMAP
– php5-cli
– mbstring
– gd
– ldap

To install the above extensions, enter the below command in Terminal.

apt-get install php5-mysql libpcre3 libpcre3 php5-xmlrpc php5-imap php5-cli php5-gd php5-common

Create Database for SiT!

Let us create a database called ‘sitdb’, database user ‘situser’ with password ‘debian’.

Login to mysql using command:

mysql -u root -p

Enter the commands one by one to create database, database user and password.

mysql> create database sitdb;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> GRANT ALL ON sitdb.* TO situser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'debian';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

mysql> flush privileges;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> exit
Bye

Download SiT!

Download the latest from here. To download from directly from Terminal, enter the following command.

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/sitracker/files/stable/3.67/sit_3.67p2.tar.gz

Extract it using command:

tar -zxvf sit_3.67p2.tar.gz

Copy the extracted files to apache root document folder.

cp -R sit-3.67/ /var/www/sit

Begin Installation

Open web browser and navigate to http://ip-address/sit or http://domain-name/sit. You should see the following like screen.

Enter your MySQL database details and click Save configuration.

Support Incident Tracker Setup - Mozilla Firefox_001Now you will get a message like in the following screenshot. This means that SiT! can’t write the configuration in /var/www/sit/config.inc.php file due to permission problem. If SiT cannot write the config file automatically it will print a message “Could not write…” as shown in the image below.

Support Incident Tracker Setup - Mozilla Firefox_002In this case you should copy the text of the configuration from within the box and paste it into a new text file called

config.inc.php

and then save this into your main SiT directory.

nano /var/www/sit/config.inc.php

Copy the contents of box in the above image.

 
<?php
# config.inc.php - SiT! Config file generated automatically by setup.php on Thu, 31 Oct 2013 11:10:53 +0530

# Web Path
# The path to SiT! from the browsers perspective with a trailing slash. e.g. /sit/
$CONFIG['application_webpath'] = '/sit/';

# MySQL Database Username
$CONFIG['db_username'] = 'situser';

# MySQL Database Password
$CONFIG['db_password'] = 'debian';

# MySQL Database Name
$CONFIG['db_database'] = 'sitdb';

# Attachment Filesystem Path
# The full absolute file system path to a directory to store attachments in (with a trailing slash). This directory should be writable
$CONFIG['attachment_fspath'] = '/var/www/sit/attachments-544d2acec01f42a9a6599981837d9613c1202dc7/';

Save and close the file. After the creating the file click on the Next button.

Now you will be able to successfully connected to your database. Click Next to continue.

Support Incident Tracker Setup - Mozilla Firefox_003SiTI requires a directory to store attachment files/folders. So click on the link Create attachment directory.

Support Incident Tracker Setup - Mozilla Firefox_004If SIT! not able to create the directory for you automatically, just manually create a directory named as shown in the below picture.

mkdir /var/www/sit/attachments-544d2acec01f42a9a6599981837d9613c1202dc7/

Now click Next button to continue.

Support Incident Tracker Setup - Mozilla Firefox_005Make the attachment directory writable by the web server using the following command:

chmod ugo+wx /var/www/sit/attachments-544d2acec01f42a9a6599981837d9613c1202dc7/

Click Next to continue.

Support Incident Tracker Setup - Mozilla Firefox_006Click Next to create database schema.

Support Incident Tracker Setup - Mozilla Firefox_007Database schema has been created successfully. Click Next to continue.

Support Incident Tracker Setup - Mozilla Firefox_008Enter the admin account password and email. Click Create Admin user button.

Support Incident Tracker Setup - Mozilla Firefox_010Now SiT! has been installed successfully. Click on Run SiT! to getting started with.

Support Incident Tracker Setup - Mozilla Firefox_011You’ll be prompted to enter the administrative user details. Enter username as admin and password of admin user that you’ve created earlier.

SiT! Support Incident Tracker - Mozilla Firefox_012This is how my SiT! dashboard looks.

SiT! Support Incident Tracker - Mozilla Firefox_013Now your new Help Desk system is ready to use. Head over to official help documentation page to know how to use SiT!. I believe usage of SiT! is not that difficult. You can easily learn how to use it if you go through the couple of pages in the official help manual. Cheers!