FAQ

"Frequently Asked Questions" (or: Things we felt that you should know)

Question: "Is PHP Trouble Ticket free?"

Short answer: No!
Longer answer: In certain cases PHP Trouble Ticket is free to use.
It is free for private and educational use as well as for use in non-profit organisations.
If you use PHP Trouble Ticket for educational use or in a non-profit organization, we just ask that you register the use by sending us a short, non-formal email telling us who you are and what you are using PHP Trouble Ticket for. This is just for our own personal statistics about how many people are actually using the program and for what purposes so that we can better improve our product.
If you want to use PHP Trouble Ticket in a commercial environment and ask for the conditions. If you use PHP Trouble Ticket in a non-profit environment and think that it really helps you with your work, we would of course gladly accept any contributions to the project you want to give.

Question: "Where do I send questions, feedback and bugreports concerning PHP Trouble Ticket to?"

General questions and feedback:
Questions about commercial use, licensing, prices and release dates:
For sending bugreports:

Question: "Is PHP Trouble Ticket finished?"

Short answer: No!
Longer answer: All vital functions and many features that were planned for it are already implemented, functional and thoroughly tested.
Of course this will not keep us from further improving the program.

Question: "I get an error 'Warning: Failed opening 'config.inc.php' for inclusion' when accessing the Troube Ticket pages
What's wrong?

Answer: This means your webserver daemon is unable to read the config file config.inc.php, most likely because of incorrect file ownership or permissions.
The file config.inc.php is the only file in the tar-archive that is not world readable because in a running Trouble Ticket system it will contain the username and password to access the SQL database.
Determine the username that your webserver process is running with (usually 'wwwrun', 'httpd', 'daemon' or 'apache') and change the file ownership of config.inc.php appropriately using the command 'chown' and the file access rights using 'chmod' so that the webserver daemon can read the file. Do not make the file world readable! (e.g. 'chmod 644 config.inc.php' - Wrong! Insecure!)

Question: "I get errors about undefined functions!"

Answer: Please check the file permissions of the php files, especially those inside the includes/ and locale/ subdirectory which are easily forgotten. The webserver process needs read access to all .php and .inc.php files.

Question: "I installed everything as described but when I load the pages, all I get is cryptic messages like TXT_LOGIN or TXT_REQUIRES_COOKIES instead of readable text."

Answer: The gettext support for PHP in some distributions seems to be broken! PHP reports that gettext functionality is available, so PHP Trouble Ticket tries to use it but apparently the gettext module doesn't translate anything. So far we have been unable to find out what exactly the problem is.
Workaround: Edit the file config.inc.php and add the following line:

define("HAVE_GETTEXT", "no");

This will manually switch off gettext support in PHP Trouble Ticket and activate the slightly slower fallback.
The only real solution to this would probably be to recompile PHP and/or apache on the affected system. We don't know yet if it's a problem of Apache or PHP.

Question: "I get an error 'Incorrect table definition; There can only be one auto column and it must be defined as a key' upon table creation!
What's wrong?"

Answer: If you get an error "ERROR 1075 at line xy: Incorrect table definition; There can only be one auto column and it must be defined as a key" upon MySQL table creation then your MySQL installation is (way) outdated!
MySQL 3.23.41 or newer is known to work.

Question: "Does PHP Trouble Ticket work with Webservers other than Apache?"

Answer: If the webserver supports PHP4 and you can get it to run together with MySQL - maybe!
We have been told that PHP Trouble Ticket can be made to work with the Microsoft IIS webserver. We have neither time nor resources to test this. YMMV! If you try a different setup and it works, tell us!

Question: "Does PHP Trouble Ticket work with PHP3?"

Short answer: No!

Question: "Does PHP Trouble Ticket work with PHP5?"

Answer: Yes, even though new features introduced by PHP 5 are not used yet.

Question: "Does PHP Trouble Ticket work with other databases?"

Short answer: Maybe!
Long answer: PHP Trouble Ticket works with both MySQL and PostgreSQL. If any other database works with the same set of SQL commands we use (or our SQL statements can easily be tweaked without loosing compatibility to MySQL and PostgreSQL) and is supported by PHP. we can surely add support for this database to PHP Trouble Ticket.

Question: "Can I run PHP Trouble Ticket in PHP safe-mode or with PHP 'open_basedir' restriction?"

Short answer: Yes! Check the documentation for details.

When trying to add a ticket / add changes to a ticket, I get an error 'Access denied', but I can log in, so my database credentials are okay. What's wrong here?

The configured database users lacks the LOCK TABLES privilege. To run TTS, the database user needs needs INSERT, UPDATE, SELECT, DELETE and LOCK TABLES privileges (the lock tables privilege has been added in MySQL 4.0.2 and was implied in previous versions).

Question: "Can I edit the 'default' fields? I'd like to disable the 'due' field…"

Sorry, but the default set of fields is not configureable, and right now we don't plan to change this.

Question: "Why is PHP Trouble Ticket encrypted?"

We decided to encrypt the PHP Trouble Ticket source to stop the license fraud we encountered in the past - especially editing out the copyright and suchlike. We're sorry for the trouble we might cause to honest users, but we felt it would be nessesary to protect our interests.

Question: "What does ''TTS unavailable: Missing or expired license.'' mean?"

From version 1.1 on, the PHP Trouble Ticket System requires a user license. If the message mentioned above appears, you either didn't enter a license or your license has expired.

Question: "What does ''Signup unavailable: Maximum allowed number of users reached.'' mean?"

It simply means that you reached the maximum number of users allowed for your current license. Contact us () for possible solutions.

What does "Too many active users are registered." mean?

This message shows up when you got more registered users than your license allows. If you got inactive users in your installation, log in as root user and delete them or set their privilege to "no privileges". Should you need a license for a larger number of users, contact us at .

When I call the escalator / the email gateway, I get the error message "Program unavailable: Missing or expired license.", but my license is working?

The additional modules are not available free for all, even though they are included in the distribution. To be allowed to use these extension, you need to have a registered license (i.e. one issued directly by us, not one obtained from the web interface).

Question: "Did you ask for permission to use the names of characters from the userfriendly.org comic in your examples?"

Short answer: Yes we did.
By the way: Have you visited Userfriendly today?

If you have a question or problem that is not covered by this list, feel free to and we will try to help you.
If you are reporting a problem with PHP Trouble Ticket, please include information about the used version of PHP Trouble Ticket, the version numbers of PHP4 and MySQL as well as the used browser(s).
Thanks for your interest in PHP Trouble Ticket!

- The Nightstone systems development team