The Answer Squad

As a network and system admin for around twenty servers, over a thousand desktops, 6 locations and an end user base of around three thousand, my email gets hammered to say the least. Everything from keyboards unplugged to switch failures taking out an entire building. I decided I needed a better way to keep track of work request and things i need to resolve. I tried a lot of different software for a solution. Bugzilla, OTRS and a few others.

I ended up with a great solution with a great community called OsTicket.

Os ticket fit the bill, it was free, open source, it is written in php so its simple for me to edit to add new fields or to change the look to fit our business needs. Mostly of all I could run it from the same box I was running all my monitoring software from for easy updates and management.

I installed OS ticket on a CentOS  box. The install is to simple, You download the latest version of Osticket currently at 1.6 RC5.  Os ticket1.6RC5 then simply follow the install guide here. you will need PHP 4.3 (or better) and MySQL 4.1. If  you aren’t familiar with MySql i recommend getting phpmyadin installed on your Linux box.

I’ve been using Os Ticket for about a month now and I wouldn’t go back to having my email filled with junk constantly for anything. It allows the ticket creator to keep up with the status of their ticket and allows you to keep more important task on task.

Take  tour of the product here:  Os Ticket Tour.