Auto Cron not working

TAS

Good morning,

We have used osTicket for years.
It is reliable and stable.
We run it on our own hardware on a Windows VM.

Recently, we had to move the virtual machine to new hardware.
The VM was copied and restarted with no problems.
osTicket functions reliably...except for Email Fetching.

Email fetching has stopped working.

The system logs show that the Auto Cron that is part of osTicket is not firing like it used to.
Everything in the settings seems correct and normal.
I have checked the PHP settings and extensions thinking something was changed in the switch over.
I attempted to update to PHP 8.4 only to realize osT 1.18.2 is not ready for this.

What have I missed?
Where should I look?

KevinTheJedi

TAS

Upgrade to v1.18.3 ASAP; seriously it's super important.
Both v1.18.2 and v1.18.3 supports PHP 8.4 (8.2-8.4 with 8.4 being recommended).
I think you are referencing your previous scheduled task/cron job, not auto-cron as that is separate. If you are talking about the true auto-cron then I would suggest that you not rely on that at all. It's only ran by the system when agents are logged in and performing activity. So if emails come in after-hours they will not be processed until an agent logs in and the system catches up to it throughout the day. If you have a scheduled task (windows) or a cron job (linux) then mail is processed automatically on a set schedule indefinitely regardless of anyone being logged in or not. Since you're on windows I would check your Scheduled Tasks for a working one for osTicket. If none, you need to create one where "Program" is the full path to the (correct version) PHP executable (eg. C:\Program Files\PHP\v8.4\php.exe) and the "Arguments" is the full path to the /api/cron.php file in your installation (eg. C:\inetpub\wwwroot\osticket\api\cron.php).
Can you also confirm that when you click on the email, click the Remote Mailbox tab, click the Config button you see a tab called Token and when clicking that you see access/refresh tokens with a green (valid) expiration?

Cheers.

TAS

TAS It is starting to look like a PHP issue. I now have an error in the logs indicating that c:\Windows\Temp is not writable.

KevinTheJedi

TAS

Ah, that's a super common PHP + Windows issue. You need to either configure PHP (via INI file) with a custom temp directory with appropriate permissions or fixup the permission on the system temp dir (which it's usually not recommended to change the security of a system folder used by many applications like that).

Cheers.

TAS

The odd thing is that the VM was copied.
Nothing in the settings or directories should have changed...
It is quite odd.

I tried to get 8.4 up but kept getting a 500 error when switching over in the PHP IIs console.
I figured it was something I goofed on.

I will update to 8.3 - In process

Oh.
The Auto Cron I am referencing is the on that is internal to osTicket.
Most of our tickets are during working hours.
After hours responses are not critical.

All of the inbound tickets go into a holding work order directory for review by me.
Many times students have placed work orders that are just not possible due to infrastructure or lack of knowledge.
I prefer to deal with them first instead of watching my staff make the funny face.

Token is current.
When oAuth2 came out, I had a deep dive into its workings.
I like the implementation that is currently in osTicket.
It doesn't require a phone call to IT to drop the filtering for 5 minutes while I set the initial token.
It was a trying time. Haven't had to do this since updating to 1.18

TAS

Updated PHP to 8.4
Come to find out that PHP 8.4 builds use Visual Studio 2022
Updated that and now PHP 8.4 runs properly.

Ugh
Missing IMAP extention...PHP
Went down the rabbit hole which is quite amusing.

Update to 1.18.3 complete.
No problems noted.

Waiting for email to process new mail folder.

KevinTheJedi

TAS

So you got it sorted then?

Yea, the woes of migrating/updating. A good tip is to always copy your INI file and dump current installed/enabled modules before upgrading PHP so you can reinstall them later on to make sure everything matches and apply any configs that are missing/changed during the upgrade. I believe you can do php -m to get list of modules; or you can create a phpinfo() file within the site folder to see loaded modules.

Cheers.

TAS

KevinTheJedi Yes.
Was putting off the updating of PHP for a variety of reasons most of which revolve about having enough time to understand what I am updating and fixing.

For example, after updating the PHP to 8,4 the Token, all of a sudden, refused to set because it couldn't find the certificate. This was after I had responded above...
So then I had to remember where I put the certificate.

I'm still not sure the system is polling the email inbox correctly.
I have an email that I can see via an email client but it is not being pulled into the system.
This problem came to light after the VM hardware was updated...
Still not sure what happened. VM was identical and was not modified.

At least the system is updated.
Its the little pieces of time that I don't really have available but has to be used.

You can lock this ticket.
I'm done.
Thank You!