Hey there. From being a consultant, sysadmin and support specialist I have been working on configuring osTicket to combine forces with an inbound sales specialist and engineer in the Netherlands. The three of us haven't been doing very well as lone wolfs in IT so we decided to start out with this open source package and share our knowledge and experience. Unfortunately I have to start with experience. I would have liked to start with more knowledge but none of us are programmers. Not sure, since we're working in Plesk, if anyone here would be able to understand what is going on here.
I started the test environment on my own domain. On Emperor Consultancy site (quite a name for what I've achieved so far :-) ) I installed Plesk/ osTicket 1.10.1 after having tried the software on my home server. I connected DATABASENAMED1. After that we decided to implement our service-side under a name and site called Mediacity IT (We like to think big and charge too small to do so). I installed osTicket on that (sub)domain, had to create a Database on install named DATABASE2 with my same Plesk user as the root user.
Then I copied DATABASE1, renamed it to DATABASE2, and renamed the prefixes accordingly. After this I had some strange outcomes with Dutch language and storage plugins which made me suspect i was learning stuff about programming and databases, but I didn't figure out where this lesson was going. Until today. I have lost connection to the database a couple of times this week as I am stress testing osTicket/Plesk and try to learn the sysadmin troubleshooting lessons.
Re installs of osTicket and restores of DATABASE2 on the new domain did the trick. In some of the logs I read today, I already wondered what warnings and errors referring to DATABASE1 where trying to tell me. But everything worked fine so I could focus on functionality towards it's future users. The thing I like most.
Now that I seemingly had control over backup, troubleshooting and restore, I discovered I could open this one most recent osTicket servicedesk website from two different domain URL's. Wondering huh?
As it is test month and i can't buy anything on black friday anyway I thouhgt let's see what happens if I start cleaning up. I deleted DATABASE1 associated with my own try-out domain. And much but not all the way to my surprise that crashed my osTicket website.
Is there anyone who can teach me something about Databases I didn't know yet and explain how these two databases act like they are one? Is there a way to merge them so I can save my functionality yet have a default install with one PHP website and one DB associated to it? Is that useful or is there any other way to restore the functionality in a complete freshly installed osTicket? Will I mess up the most recent tables records and fields by trying to merge the data? Did I make a mess? (Yes, I did I guess)