ryv's blog

Anyone working in the IT sector knows how hard it is to get a flow going without interruptions. Working in a small business and supplying support for everything in IT to our clients, the phone rings constantly (desk and mobile) and email never stops pinging in the background. Add to this our obsession with multiple screens, a billion web pages open, Twitter, FaceBook, Instagram etc and there is a huge amount of data overwhelming us. We also get jobs logged from our other staff members, clients can create their own and the phone calls / emails generally generate work to be done. Keeping up with all of this is hard, and the hardest part is keeping all the tasks straight and on point. We use multiple systems - OTRS and another, non-cool job management system for our tasks. This is a nightmare too - jobs coming in to both, keeping them updated and trying to remember if you've actually updated the job or not. Plus trying to keep on track with a complex task long enough to get the thin

Recently one of our clients relocated their main office and we moved their servers for them. Upon arrival, racking and cabling the XenServer hosts all powered up immediately. The HP StoreEasy NAS with all the data on it also started up. We noticed that our XenServer hosts had no IP addresses - no data was showing and they seemed to have lost their configuration. Uh oh.... we had a huge bet on getting this thing going by the end of the day with the managing director. There were beers involved and we were pumped to make it work. After fiddling around with the XenServers and trying to get it working and swearing a *lot*, I turned them all off then back on. Lo and behold they came up and it took a bit to figure out what had gone wrong. The answer was simple - the XenServer hosts are big, fast machines with a lean install on a high speed SAS drive and the NAS is slower - running Windows Storage Server 2012 and RAID'ed disks. The hosts had come up first, looked for the storage repo

I've been using OTRS for about 10 years now, starting when I was doing desktop / server support at uni. Since then it's changed a lot in the way it looks, but fundamentally it has remained the same. The great things about OTRS are: creating / modifying / updating and closing tickets is easy the interface is relatively straightforward creation of tickets from emails is easy reporting is straightforward open source and robust Since the early versions it's ticked all these boxes and I was very interested to see what OTRS 5 was going to bring. The interface is still the same, updated here and there with a prettier graph showing closed / opened tickets but generally the same. Fonts are still nice and readable and its good for what it does. We use it for our clients that have a maintenance agreement with us. We have them create tickets that we then update and put minutes against. OTRS has never had a parts component and we have always used a secondary system for tha