Few issues during upgrade - Email Templates - No Emails to all users

ccoggins

Hello,

I wanted to start by saying that I have zero experience with OSTicket.
The company I work for asked me to move OSTicket from Server 2012 to Server 2019 and upgrade it to the newest version. This has been my only experience with this software so I apologize for my lack of knowledge in this post.

The original OSTicket was 1.16.1.

A few things to note: Our company underwent a domain change after acquiring a new company.
The reason I mentioned this is that someone attempted to upgrade OSTicket before myself doing it yesterday and they were unable to get the "Client" LDAP authentication to work while the "Admin/Staff" site worked just fine.

What I ended up doing yesterday was uninstalling everything, Deleting the OSTicket folder / uninstalling MySQL, and removing the OSTicket DB.

Then I proceeded by installing MySQL > Created an OSTicket Database.
Installed OSTicket 1.18.1 from scratch - Installed the LDAP plugin and made sure both "Staff and Client" worked by using domain\username.

Then I went back and deleted the OSTicket Database again > Then imported the old Database.
OSTicket identified that things needed to be upgraded and I went ahead and pressed the Upgrade button from the website and let it do the upgrade.

Issue #1
Everything seems to be working Staff/Client-wise - The one issue I do have is the Staff can log in just using USERNAME/PASS. While the Clients have to do DOMAIN\USERNAME - PASS

Issue #2
Another issue I am running into is for some odd reason when a Client puts in a ticket. I seem to be the only person getting the notification (It is no longer sending emails to the entire support group). I used the "Test Email" feature and I can send emails to myself and everyone else on my team, but they are no longer getting them when someone puts in a ticket.

Issue #3
Another issue I am seeing is - I am getting funky characters in my Subject on the emails OSTicket is sending out.
pasteboard[dot]co/B390dQIdzM0Q.png
I did notice though that in the templates they also had the funky characters, but I do not see anything on the Subject line - so I am unsure of how to remove/fix this.
pasteboard[dot]co/NwEMsAR3DVrm.png

So far these are the 3 main issues I am running into.
When I go to the System Logs I am seeing a "Mailer Error"

Unable to email via Sendmail Unable to send mail: mail(): Failed to connect to mailserver at "localhost" port 25, verify your "SMTP" and "smtp_port" setting in php.ini or use ini_set()

I am not sure what PHP file to check for this.

---- Info ---
OSTicket 1.18.1 > Upgrade from 1.16.1
Windows Server 2019
We are using PHP Mail > Using IMAP
PHP 8.2.9
MySQL 8.1
Most of the issues mentioned above are all from the Client UI

Sending Tickets via Client Side
Logging in via Client Side

KevinTheJedi

ccoggins

Issue #1
With PHP 8.2 LDAP needs the upgraded Net_LDAP2 package. You can read more here:

https://github.com/osTicket/osTicket/issues/6642#issuecomment-1830780298

Essentially it requires unpacking the plugin to raw files, downloading the latest Net_LDAP2 package, and then replacing the existing Net_LDAP2 folder with the new one. We are upgrading the plugin during next release so this will all be included with the upcoming builds.

Issue #2
You need to check all of your system alert settings and Department settings to ensure the Department has a working email set as the outgoing email and that alerts are enabled for all parties needed. You can read more here:

https://docs.osticket.com/en/latest/Guides/Alerts%20Guide.html

Issue #3
Please post images in this forum. I do not click third party links.

The sendmail error means SMTP is failing so it's trying to use local sendmail on the server as a fallback but you likely don't have that configured. You need to check all system emails to ensure the fetching/sending is setup and working correctly.

Cheers.

ccoggins

KevinTheJedi

Thank you for the reply, Kevin.

The email issue has been resolved.
It turns out the person I was working with helped me diagnose and make sure the migration of OSTicket was working - His Outlook was not working correctly and after a PC reboot he started getting the emails.

I will look at upgrading the LDAP plugin to see if this resolves my issue of having the clients be required to use DOMAIN\USERNAME to log in.

I found that a lot of our email templates during the migration/upgrade ended up with these weird characters randomly in them.
This was fixed by just editing the templates. I just wanted to make you aware as this might be something that can be fixed in a later version.

The old server is still available for me I can provide you with the files you wanted to look at to possibly try to diagnose anything.

I will report back if the LDAP update to the plugin resolves my issue.

Thanks again!

KevinTheJedi

ccoggins

For the email template issue, I don’t think I’ve seen before (if I have I don’t remember) and seems specific to your setup or maybe something happened when you migrated the database over to the new server. Either way it should be a one-off thing. Next time you upgrade you shouldn’t see such issues.

Cheers.

KevinTheJedi

ccoggins

Oh btw, for the plugin thing, once you de-PHAR the plugin to it's raw files in order to use this you have to go to the database, go to the _plugin table, find the record for the LDAP plugin, set isphar to 0, and update the install_path value to remove the .phar part. Once you do that remove the actual packaged plugin (the .phar version) away from the site directory so nothing conflicts with the raw files. Lastly, you can restart the webserver and/or PHP-FPM to ensure the old PHAR isn't being cached (PHAR files are typically always cached to avoid unpacking them every load).

Cheers.

ccoggins

KevinTheJedi

Thank you again for the tips on the LDAP fix.
Quick question on that - Do you know if this will allow for Multi-Domain use?
I just found out today that we still have a handful of users still on the old Domain but were unable to log in.

Earlier in the week when I was searching the forums on how to upgrade and also fix the original LDAP issue. I found a post where someone had created a workaround for multi-domain use. I may have to try and find that again.
In theory, the LDAP server I have OSTicket connected to should be able to see this other domain as well since it is top-level so I wouldn't need anything to add in multi-ldap servers, but I could.

Kind regards.

KevinTheJedi

ccoggins

We don't have the concept of multi-ldap which is why there are a few 3rd party plugins for it. We do not recommend using 3rd party mods/plugins as they were not written by, not reviewed by, not approved by, nor maintained by us (core osTicket devs). If you do so, proceed at your own risk.

We do however have the concept of multi-instance plugins. So in theory you could create a new Plugin Instance for each LDAP domain you want to authenticate.

Cheers.

ccoggins

Marking this as resolved.
I was unable to do the LDAP upgrade - I didn't have a lot of time last week to dive really deep into figuring out how to do this so I will likely wait until the next OSTicket update and then run an upgrade.

KevinTheJedi
Thank you so much for your time and help!