Why do you mention the closed/proprietary VMWare and not KVM ? We're in the open source world...

Except we're not. OTRS is typically used in business environments, where KVM is not common, but VMWare is. I would find such a VM image very useful as well. It's a major pain right now to build a system using the distributor packages; it'd be much easier to have a "OTRS Now!" system to start with. (the Debian packaging right now is really, really busted if you expect to use the OTRS packaging system to install ITSM, etc...)

-----Original Message----- From: otrs-bounces@otrs.org [mailto:otrs-bounces@otrs.org] On Behalf Of Michiel Beijen <plug> You can try out OTRS using OTRS OnDemand - it runs OTRS 3 and is a way to test out OTRS quickly. A 30-day trial is free, and you can if you want after the 30 days either start paying and keep using (and it's a small fee) or use the Pack & Go option to move to an on-premise OTRS system installed in your data center. </plug>

Except that solves a different problem than the one I'm trying to address. The problem is that the currently available packages for installing OTRS from the distributors (RH, Debian, etc) are either 1) ancient (2.4.2 for RH), or 2) broken (Debian) in that they use a path naming structure that breaks the use of the OTRS package manager (even after doing the stupid hack in the README.Debian to allow the package manager to work at all -- and yes, I filed a bug report with the Debian packager). At the moment, you pretty much have to build from source to get a working OTRS system. (Problem item 2 also breaks your Pack & Go option, BTW. ) The idea of a starter appliance would be very helpful -- then there would be a known target for Pack and Go that would always work. As it is, it makes customers use lots of consulting time for very little benefit.

FWIW, I'm working on a new Fedora package (in fact, I'm using OTRS 3 already in a pilot system using my own package), which should also work for RHEL6 (and CentOS etc.) in the future (but if RHEL+EPEL has all Perl deps I do not know yet). I started with the old (Fedora 7) package, but that was completely crap.

It still has to be improved a lot. Unfortunately, OTRS' way of installing various kinds of files in one tree (sometimes even in one directory) does not make proper packaging (i.e. complying to FHS etc.) an easy job.

Something that would be interesting to know: would the OTRS developers accept using something like cmake to do their builds? If so, then it's relatively straightforward to use cpack to generate both RPMs and .DEBs (as well as MAcOS and Windows) packages automagically.

Not sure what problem this would solve...

Mostly to help autogenerate the various files needed to create the package in different forms and keep them updated without manual intervention, and to specify the install steps in a generic way across systems. That's the part that I find most tedious about packaging stuff, and if you need to generate a large number of packages on different systems, having a consistent way of doing it is a big help.

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 05:22:33PM -0500, Wes wrote:

Because I use vmware and I've never heard of KVM. I meant no insult.

Don't worry, I did not see it like that. I just want to keep people awake about the "right" choice (in moral sense, practice is sometimes different in the corporate world, I know...) in the OSS world ;-). -- -- Jos Vos -- X/OS Experts in Open Systems BV | Phone: +31 20 6938364 -- Amsterdam, The Netherlands | Fax: +31 20 6948204

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 05:56:20PM -0500, Wes wrote:

Where can I find a KVM virtual machine application for OS X? I'm not finding it on the Google.

What is the relation between OS X and open source, except that Steve has stolen (well, it was legal, but you know what I mean) *BSD ? Luckily, Steve *does* allow you at least to make phone calls with your OSS-based iPhone (but not much more... ;-)). Sorry, I couldn't resist... More seriously: KVM is Linux-only, AFAIK, although there might be a way to convert a KVM VM to other VMs like VMWare. -- -- Jos Vos -- X/OS Experts in Open Systems BV | Phone: +31 20 6938364 -- Amsterdam, The Netherlands | Fax: +31 20 6948204

How about a virtualbox vm? It's mostly open source (unless you need USB support, but it's still gratis/free) and very cross platform. http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads plus there are ample tutorials about VDI to VDMK conversion if you need it. On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 11:31 AM, Wes wrote:

On 11/19/10 1:10 AM, "Jos Vos" wrote:

...

More seriously: KVM is Linux-only, AFAIK, although there might be a way to convert a KVM VM to other VMs like VMWare.

Then it wouldn't help me since our computers are running OS X. Thanks.

-- Wes Plate Automatic Duck, Inc. http://www.automaticduck.com

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I have a fedora 14 virtualbox ready Il giorno 20/nov/2010 03:20, "Gerald Young" ha scritto: I have a 1.5GB VirtualBox .vdi available. It's Ubuntu Server 32-bit 10.10 patched as of today and today's (Nov 19,2010) release of OTRS. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15333373/OTRS3.vdi Of note: I believe all appropriate perl modules related to otrs have been installed, but NO TWEAKS to MySQL or OTRS. This means that the package size maximum will need to be adjusted if necessary. You'll need VirtualBox (or convert to VDMK). I'd appreciate any feedback... The .vdi is dynamic to 8GB max and was built with 512MB ram on the VM. It might make sense to make the network "Bridged" so you can see it. It's DHCP by default. Also, you'll want to configure the hostname / dpkg-reconfigure postfix if you want email to send correctly. In case you completely ignore it, the default username is guest and password is guest. To get to root, sudo su. The mysql root user's password is root. You should (I HOPE!) be told all this and the IP address from the virtual machine console. (It updates /etc/issue automatically). If you ignore all that, ifconfig will tell you the IP address and then you'll be able to browse to http://IPAddress/otrs/installer.pl NOTE: The default security stinks! You'll WANT to change the passwords for guest and mysql root. If you don't change it, ... well, I warned you. :) NOTE: There are .dist files in /opt/otrs that were not copied without .dist (procmail, fetchmail, for example). If you need them, you'll need to rename/copy them appropriately. hint to change to static IP: http://www.debianhelp.org/node/3246 Again, I would appreciate any feedback. Kind regards, Gerald Young (crythias) On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 12:13 PM, Gerald Young wrote:

How about a virtual...

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Many thanks for your commitment Gerald :) Marco also posted the general idea of VMs on ideascale for discussion and voting : http://otrsteam.ideascale.com/a/dtd/VM-repository/89914-10369 Regards Alexander -- radprax Gesellschaft fuer Medizinische Versorgungszentren mbH | Domicile and Register Court: Wuppertal, HRB 19359 | Bergstr. 7-9, 42105 Wuppertal Management Board: Andreas Martin, Dr. Heiner Steffens, Dr. Renate Tewaag Phone +49 202 2489 1123, Fax +49 202 2489 941123