WebTTS 2.1
(C) 1998 Robert Gash

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

This program is distributed under the GNU GPL.  You may freely distribute
modified copies of this program under the terms contained in the GNU
General Public License.

Introduction
------------
This package is provides for businesses (or individuals) that require a
trouble tracking system.  I have written this implementation for use by an
ISP in an environment where they must track service problems (outages,
downtime, emergencies) coming from many sources covering a vast array of
topics.  Within this package you will find all of the programs necessary
to run a WWW-based Trouble Ticketing system, that can be accessed through
your favorite browser.  This program provides rudimentary authentication
and report tracking.

Requirements
------------
This package requires PERL5 (5.004 or later), DB_File, and Term::ReadKey.
All of this comes with the default PERL5 installation, so you should
already have these if you did it right.  If not, you can get them from
your local CPAN mirror (www.cpan.org).

Installation
------------
Installation of this is very simple:

1) Copy the tts.pl, tts-*.pl and cgi-lib.pl scripts to a directory that is
   publicly accessible and has permission to run CGI programs.

2) Give all the files a+rx permissions (0555 for you numerical permission
   people) that you have just placed in the public CGI directory.

3) Go to the directory you just placed all of the scripts in and edit the
   tts-inc.pl file.  Change the $action = "http://someaction" to the URL
   where your script is accessible (only the http://path/to/tts.pl is
   needed).  Next change the $udb and $tdb paths to some path on your
   system that is writable by your webserver.  The filenames aren't
   important, but I should note $udb is the users db file, and $tdb is the
   tickets database file.  Save your changes to the tts-inc.pl file.

4) Run the adduser.pl script either as root, or as a user that has
   permission to write to your user database directory(s).  Answer the
   questions asked.  This will add your first user to the DB system.

5) Change the ownership of that users.db file to the user and group that
   the webserver runs as (the webserver needs to have write access to all
   of the db files, or the program won't work!).  Also make sure the
   directory you are keeping the tickets.db file in has write permissions
   for the user or group that the webserver runs as.

6) Access the tts.pl file you have installed through your favorite WWW
   browser.  You will be prompted with a login screen, enter your login
   and password you just assigned yourself.

That's it!  Nothing more to do!  When you create your first ticket the
program will automatically initialize the tickets.db file.  The user
interface is very self explanatory, you shouldn't have any problems moving
about the program.

I do request that you send me an eMail with your name, company, and field
of business so I can enter it in my database I keep here of users.  This
is not required, but I do appreciate knowing someone out there likes my
work.  You can find my contact addresses at the bottom of this file.

Miscellany
----------
I have also included 2 other programs to aid in the operation of this
program:

1)  deluser.pl -- This lets you delete a user from the users.db file.  You
    must have write permission to the users.db file or this won't work!
2)  pubview.pl -- This program allows people to view public alerts.  By
    default public alerts are "ALERT"s "System Maintenance" and "System
    Downtime" tickets.  If a ticket is closed, public users can't see it,
    so you don't have to show users the old tickets.  You call the script
    from an <A HREF> or direct access like this: pubview.pl?type .  "type"
    can be "alert" for Alerts, "downtime" for System Downtime, or
    "maintenance" for System Maintenance (without the quotes of course).  When
    you use pubview.pl, please be sure that the include
    '/path/to/tts-inc.pl'; points to the proper path for tts-inc.pl.

Contact
-------
You can contact me (Robert Gash) at the following addresses

Robert Gash
2793 Admirals Walk Dr. N
Orange Park, FL 32073-6130

eMail: gashalot@gashalot.com
eMail: gashalot@cybermax.net
