Some thoughts on SiT requirements and LDAP configuration

[v0hkus]

It's been a while since I used SiT as internal support solution for one of my customers. At that time I used very simple configuration with few contacts in internal database. And now I plan to deploy SiT with more complex configuration and AD integration in a larger company. At the moment I carry out tests on version 3.65 in existing environment and would like to share some thoughts on problems I faced.

1. Requirements

Only web server, PHP and MySQL are mentioned on the Installation page in Wiki. With this components SiT will definitely run, but SiT scheduler will not, regardless of cron being configured correctly. This is because of php5-cli module for PHP missing. I think it's a good idea to add this module to the Requirements and to refer to it on the Scheduler page in Wiki.

2. LDAP configuration

"LDAP Customer default site" must be the required field if the "LDAP Customer Group" is specified, because of the function check_valid in classes.inc.php (line 315). If the default site is not specified while Customer contacts are on the LDAP server, the ldapSync action will fail and no error message will be displayed. This is a big problem as you need to turn on the Debug Mode, examine the error log and then classes.inc.php to discover whats wrong with LDAP synchronisation.

Except the default site not being specified, the ldapSync action will also fail if a user on the LDAP server (treated as Customer contact) has no surname. When you add a contact to the local database through the administrative interface the fields "Forename" and "Surname" are required, but if you create users in AD for example surname is optional. And again you need to examine the error log and then classes.inc.php to find out that the problem is in the function check_valid and empty surname.

Regards,
Yuri.

[Tomse]

hello v0khus

About the php5-cli it differs from dist to dist if it's part of the php5 install, which is probably why we didn't add the module in the first place. but thank you for bringing attention to it.. I'll add it in the wiki in a few. You are, of course, also more than welcome to edit the wiki yourself, if you have some additions/corrections to it.

the ldap problems you have, can you log these as individual bugs in mantis please ?

and thank you very much for the feedback

cheers
Tomse