Setup Help Desk System Using OTRS On CentOS 6.5

Introduction

OTRS, stands for Open source Ticket Request System, is a popular help desk software that can be used to assign tickets to incoming queries, and tracks further communications when needed. using OTRS, we can manage incoming inquiries, complaints, support requests, defect reports, and other communications.

In this tutorial, let us see how to install OTRS latest version on CentOS 6.5. Here, my testbox details are given below:

Operating System: CentOS 6.5 Minimal
IP Address: 192.168.0.150/24
Hostname: ansh.geniusansh.com

Prerequisites

Before installing OTRS, we have to do couple of prerequisites first.

First, make sure you have configured the proper FQDN name in /etc/hosts file.

vi /etc/hosts

Set the hostname as shown below:

127.0.0.1   localhost localhost.localdomain localhost4 localhost4.localdomain4
::1         localhost localhost.localdomain localhost6 localhost6.localdomain6
 192.168.0.150     ansh.geniusansh.com    ansh

Log off or restart the system to take effect the saved changes.

Install and enable EPEL repository.

# wget http://epel.mirror.net.in/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
# rpm -Uvh epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

Now list out the installed repositories using command:

# yum repolist
Log in as root user and Install Mysql server using the following command:
If you are new in MySql then use this Link..
Install LAMP Server (Apache, MySQL, PHP) On RHEL, CentOS, Scientific Linux 6.5

Database configuration

mysql -u root -p

Create database and database user for otrs. Here, database name for OTRS is ‘otrs‘ and MySQL user for OTRS is ‘otrsuser’.

Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or g.
Your MySQL connection id is 2
Server version: 5.5.35 MySQL Community Server (GPL) by Remi

Copyright (c) 2000, 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its
affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective
owners.

Type 'help;' or 'h' for help. Type 'c' to clear the current input statement.

mysql> create database otrs;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.03 sec)

mysql> GRANT ALL ON otrs.* TO 'otrsuser'@'192.168.0.150' IDENTIFIED BY 'admin@123';

Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.09 sec)

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

mysql> exit
Bye

Edit file /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf,

cp /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf.bak

vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Find the following lines and modify them as shown below:

ServerAdmin root@domain.com
ServerName [hostname or IP address]:80
Listen IP-address-of-the-server:80

Save and close file. Restart httpd service.

service httpd restart

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Adjust iptables to allow apache default port 80.

Edit file /etc/sysconfig/iptables,
vi /etc/sysconfig/iptables
Add the following line:

-A INPUT -p tcp -m state --state NEW -m tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
Then, restart iptables to take effect the saved changes using the following command:
service iptables restart

Disable SELinux, otherwise you will get the following error:

If you want to use the installer, set the Kernel/Config.pm writable for the webserver user!

To disable SELinux, Edit file /etc/sysconfig/selinux,
vi /etc/sysconfig/selinux

Set value to disabled.

SELINUX=disabled

After that, reboot the system.

Download OTRS

Go to the OTRS download page and download the latest version.

wget http://ftp.otrs.org/pub/otrs/RPMS/rhel/6/otrs-3.3.6-01.noarch.rpm

The above will download and save the OTRS rpm file in the current directory. Install it using command:

yum install otrs-3.3.6-01.noarch.rpm

The above command will install otrs package along with all required packages.

Finally, restart httpd service one more time after installing OTRS.

service httpd restart

During OTRS installation, keep attention on the installer. It will display the web installer URL for OTRS.

Look at the following screenshot.

Install Additional PERL modules

Before proceeding to configure OTRS, you should install additional perl modules. Run the following command to know the required modules by OTRS:

/opt/otrs/bin/otrs.CheckModules.pl

Sample output:

o Crypt::Eksblowfish::Bcrypt.......Not installed! (optional - For strong

password hashing.)
 o Crypt::SSLeay....................ok (v0.57)
 o Date::Format.....................ok (v2.22)
 o DBI..............................ok (v1.609)
 o DBD::mysql.......................ok (v4.013)
 o DBD::ODBC........................Not installed! (optional - Required to

connect to a MS-SQL database.)
 o DBD::Oracle......................Not installed! (optional - Required to

connect to a Oracle database.)
 o DBD::Pg..........................Not installed! (optional - Required to

connect to a PostgreSQL

database.)
 o Encode::HanExtra.................Not installed! (optional - Required to

handle mails with several

Chinese character sets.)
 o GD...............................Not installed! (optional - Required for

 stats.)
 o GD::Text.......................Not installed! (optional - Required for

stats.)
 o GD::Graph......................Not installed! (optional - Required for

stats.)
 o IO::Socket::SSL..................ok (v1.31)
 o JSON::XS.........................Not installed! (optional - Recommended

for faster AJAX/JavaScript

 handling.)
 o List::Util::XS...................ok (v1.21)
 o LWP::UserAgent...................ok (v6.05)
 o Mail::IMAPClient.................Not installed! (optional - Required for

 IMAP TLS connections.)
 o IO::Socket::SSL................ok (v1.31)
 o ModPerl::Util....................ok (v2.000004)
 o Net::DNS.........................ok (v0.65)
 o Net::LDAP........................ok (v0.40)
 o Net::SSL.........................ok (v2.84)
 o PDF::API2........................Not installed! (optional - Required for

 PDF output.)
 o Compress::Zlib.................ok (v2.021)
 o Text::CSV_XS.....................Not installed! (optional - Recommended

for faster CSV handling.)
 o Time::HiRes......................ok (v1.9721)
 o XML::Parser......................ok (v2.36)
 o YAML::XS.........................Not installed! (required - Please

install this module - )

As you see in the above output, some perl modules are missing. Install them all at once or one by one as shown below.

yum install "perl(Crypt::Eksblowfish::Bcrypt)" "perl(DBD::ODBC)"

"perl(DBD::Oracle)" "perl(DBD::Pg)" "perl(Encode::HanExtra)" "perl(GD)"

"perl(GD::Text)" "perl(GD::Graph)" "perl(JSON::XS)""perl(Mail::IMAPClient)"

#"perl(PDF::API2)" "perl(Text::CSV_XS)" "perl(YAML::XS)"#

Now, check again for any missing modules.

/opt/otrs/bin/otrs.CheckModules.pl

Sample output:

o Crypt::Eksblowfish::Bcrypt.......ok (v0.009)
 o Crypt::SSLeay....................ok (v0.57)
 o Date::Format.....................ok (v2.22)
 o DBI..............................ok (v1.609)
 o DBD::mysql.......................ok (v4.013)
 o DBD::ODBC........................ok (v1.48)
 o DBD::Oracle......................Not installed! (optional - Required to

connect to a Oracle database.)
 o DBD::Pg..........................ok (v2.15.1)
 o Encode::HanExtra.................ok (v0.23)
 o GD...............................ok (v2.44)
 o GD::Text.......................ok (v0.86)
 o GD::Graph......................ok (v1.44)
 o IO::Socket::SSL..................ok (v1.31)
 o JSON::XS.........................ok (v2.27)
 o List::Util::XS...................ok (v1.21)
 o LWP::UserAgent...................ok (v6.05)
 o Mail::IMAPClient.................ok (v3.34)
 o IO::Socket::SSL................ok (v1.31)
 o ModPerl::Util....................ok (v2.000004)
 o Net::DNS.........................ok (v0.65)
 o Net::LDAP........................ok (v0.40)
 o Net::SSL.........................ok (v2.84)
 o PDF::API2........................ok (v2.019)
 o Compress::Zlib.................ok (v2.021)
 o Text::CSV_XS.....................ok (v0.85)
 o Time::HiRes......................ok (v1.9721)
 o XML::Parser......................ok (v2.36)
 o YAML::XS.........................ok (v0.38)

If everything seems good, proceed to web installer.

Begin OTRS Web installer

OTRS development team has made a simple way web based installer to make the installation lot easier.

Open up the web browser and navigate to http://ip-address/otrs/installer.pl.

Click Next to continue.

OK dear i think u select proper screen like License Agreement and Database Selection and the administrator Email for OTRS, system FQDN, organization name and also enter the inbound and outbound mail settings. Also, You can setup this option later in the administration dashboard.

Congratulations! We have successfully implemented the OTRS system. Note down the the default username and password of the administrative account.

As you see in the above screenshot, the installer shows you the the administrative login URL, default username and password.

Access OTRS dashboard

Navigate to http://ip-address/otrs/otrs/index.pl from your browser. Enter the default user name and password.

This is how the OTRS administrative dashboard looks.

After successful installation, we have to do some installation tasks. The first one is to start the scheduler. Click on the warning link that says: “Scheduler is not running” on the top.

Click Start Scheduler button.

Next change the default password of the admin account(root@locahost) by clicking on the username on the upper top right corner.

Enter the current password, and enter the new password twice. Finally, click Update.

OTRS Administration

As you may know, working on OTRS with admin user is not recommended. So, create new users(agents).

Go to the Admin section on the top menu bar, and select Agents to create new user.

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