sticking posts and first steps short manual

[AndilgE]

Dear all,

First of all I would like to thank Marco for the great opportunity given to me with HotelDruid and this forum. This is my first post in this forum and would like to introduce myself to the community.

I have technical background, am originally formed in electronics and have changed to ICT coordination, in which I've been working the last 10 years. Before this I've worked in a travel agency, mainly with land services, eg. hotels, car rentals, motor homes. I adore traveling and look back on many visited places around the world. As of 2012 my wife and I decided to build and later run a hotel in north eastern Brazil and we're happily and successfully selling beds as of mid December 2014. I've dedicated almost 2 decades to tourism and tourism industry in all of its parts and looked at the topic with the points of view of a client, of various retailers and finally as a service provider. I've gotten to know the food chain from one end to the other.

Let's come back to HotelDruid and the subject in the title. I don't know about your experience to get HotelDruid started with hosting outside the offered package, but looking to the past some weeks the installation and initial configuration was a pain in the neck. Even with the read me files in the install packages and this forum some points have not been clarified spontaneously, but only by debugging and taking a deeper look in the code. In our hotels we need hosting in the local area network as the connection to the internet is unstable and very slow (yes, even in 2015 this still exists) and we want to be able to serve our clients without gaps.

We've passed through the first heavy time and found the solutions. Some of them where really silly, others special and complicated. I’m convinced there is potential to make things better here. This might prevent negative experiences for other new comers, therefore rise popularity and manifest HotelDruid for a longer time and keep the motivation of programmer Marco on a good level to continue keeping alive this interesting product. Let’s face the truth, as long as HotelDruid is maintained, all of us will win. Open source is a community thing where all participants can and should help, however they can.

What do you all think about bringing more of your know-how and experience with the daily business with HotelDruid to the HotelDruid forum and make important ones sticky topics on the very top of the list? Who has the privilege to stick a topic anyway and how the decision is taken whether or not to stick a topic?

[clayton256]

Hi,

Thanks for starting this topic!

Much like you, I come from many years of tech work experience. Now my wife and I are buying a caravan park. I prefer to use open source software whenever possible. I find hoteldruid to be the best open source option for us to take reservations. The more I dig through the code, the more I realize it can do. The package already does a lot but I would love to see more features added (I'll post my feature requests later under the proper forum). I too would also love to see better "hot to get started" documentation. Even a glossary and/or a FAQ would be a huge step forward. I would not have stuck it out installing hoteldruid if these forums were not available. I can't agree more that the initial install and configure will prevent many people from using this software. I also agree that the more people that use it the more it will improve so we all will benefit. I think 'sticky' post is a great start to documenting troubles and their solutions. I will go back and find the posts I found helpful and post them here. Also, I would like to collaborate with anyone that is adding features. fixing bugs or developing tutorials. Please feel free to private message me to introduce yourself and share your work. I will share/post my work when it's ready.

Mark Clayton

[AndilgE]

.. awesome, reply in 2 days !! This forum is alive.

Here just a summery of what we've done for installation here. I hope this will make things easier for other ones.

Hardware: QNAP SOHO server TS-210 (I had a 6 years old one which I could prepare in very little time). This device comes with apache server and MySQL pre-installed as per firmware which radically accelerated the installation of HotelDruid.

For a tut a step by step how to on localhost and with host in LAN (eg. an old computer/laptop with xampp installed) might be interesting. The fist step for sure is getting the apache server up and running with good configurations. I'm using the default apache server configurations prepared by QNAP and they work fine for me, so I've never gotten deeper into this topic.

Next step is choosing one of the supported database formats (yes, HotelDruid supports various) and get this connected to the apache server. Questions like 'which is the best db' should not make part of the tut. There are other threads about this leading even into discussions like about religions. My favorite is PostgreSQL as it is open source, has good performance, a vivid community etc. I ended up using MySQL as it makes part of the QNAP package. I have no big experience of connecting apache server and db server. Default port settings and php.ini file should be described in the tut.

The aim probably is to make HotelDruid accessible also from the world wide web. Virtual host settings in apache server, network (local router port forwarding settings) and DDNS are the means to fulfill this need. QNAP makes it easy with local host settings and DDNS, router settings are according to each device, there are no general rules about this. Please bring you settings and screen shots to collect some different examples.

Once passed all of these these obstacles we're ready for the local installation of HotelDruid. Just decompress the installation package in the web root directory according to your virtual host setting.
Example: Let's say apache server is set up to the local directory \\192.1.1.230\ and your virtual host settings determine http request coming in through port 8086 are forwarded to the sub folder 'hoteldruid' in your general web root directory, this sub folder \\192.1.1.230\hoteldruid (samba protocol, default for windows) becomes the web root device for HotelDruid which will then become accessible with \\192.1.1.230:8086\. So unpacking the HotelDruid installation files into this directory is what has to be done. Remeber the router settings forwarding incoming request with port 8086 to port 8086 of the device where HotelDruid is installed (tip: give this device a fix IP address, not DHCP in your local area network for stable assigning and easier call up later).

Passed all of this with success, call up HotelDruid with http://[IP address of your device]/[web root directory of HotelDruid]
where [IP address of your device] is the (hopefully) fix IP address you've given for your HotelDruid host and
[web root directory of HotelDruid] is the web root directory as per virtual host settings.
In relation to our example above this will be
http://192.1.1.230/hoteldruid

Test port forwarding with http://192.1.1.230:8086/
and your DDNS with [your personal domain as per DDNS service]:8086
where [your personal domain as per DDNS] is according to your setup with your dynamic domain name server service (read about this in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_DNS)

If you see the installation screen of HotelDruid where you can enter database details, you have successfully installed HotelDruid. What comes now is establishing the db connection and setting up HotelDruid to your personal needs, your situation. HotelDruid comes with a self explaining assistant and I'm confident as from here everyone manages to go on further. For specialties please have a closer look at the read me files or post questions in the forum.

Brgs

AndilgE

[AndilgE]

... sorry, I've forgotten 2 step I've done here as well.

First of all harden security of your HotelDruid by giving good privileges to the folders and files with CHMOD. Generally speaking give 755 for all the folders and 664 for the files. It works fine for me up until now, but I have no guarantee this is ok for all of the cases.

Security also is a topic if you access HotelDruid by www with DDNS. Think about encrypting the data being sent to and retrieved from/to HotelDruid. These are sensitive information about your clients which deserve responsible treatment.

Use a self signed certificate with SHA-256 (do not use OpenSSL default SHA-1 algorithm as in some month modern browsers will no longer accept it). You can create this with OpenSSL for free and will find more about this following the information in
https://www.google.com/search?q=self+si ... te+sha-256

I've created a server certificate and private key which is valid for 10 years. Once done and installed to the server your fine off as your device most probably will not live longer than 10 years.

Calling up URLs with https protocol that are bound to a self signed certificate cause an alert message as the identification can't be verified and assured. You know and trust yourself and don't need to identify yourself to you, so just continue accessing the URL without sorrow. Some browsers allow adding an exception rule for some URLs to get rid of the 'false alert'. You will have the benefit of encrypted data exchange that guarantees privacy for you and the clients you treat.

https protocol is not necessary when you access HotelDruid from your local network, http is ok in your own environment.

Brgs

AndilgE

[marco]

Hello,
thanks for reporting your experience, please feel free to post it on the wiki too. I think the wiki can be organized better to share documents than sticky posts.

Regards,
Marco