News
How to reply with your signature above the quoted text
Have you become accustomed to your e-mail programs placing the signature above the quoted text in your replies? You may have been irritated by the fact that Cerb4 seemed backwards — forcing you to cut & paste your signature to the top of every reply.
Putting the signature below the quoted text is Cerb4’s default behavior. [...]
The first things you need to do after installing Cerb4
I finished the installer and logged in, now what?
When you first encounter the Cerb4 Overview screen you may be a little confused on where to go next. The first thing you’ll want to do is probably read the “Welcome to Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0!” ticket. That will at least give you an idea of what groups [...]
Why I Can’t Stand Using Cerb3
Cerb3 was a bumpy patch in the rear-facing road of Cerberus Helpdesk updates. It’s a point where we had already realized that Cerb2 was making many daily tasks more difficult than necessary, but in finding a solution with that knowledge we made the major mistake of trying to introduce new ideas without removing any old [...]
Where’s my “Reply to All” button? [Part 2]
Welcome to the conclusion of learning to live without a “reply to all” button. Part 1 in this two-part series explained how you can change requesters on a per ticket basis. If you recall my argument for excluding a “reply to all” button was that Cerb4 users generally want to reply to some but not everyone [...]
Rock the Vote! CHD-805: RSS Explorer
Welcome to the first edition of Feature Request Spotlight! As you may recall from one of my early write-ups, I proposed a regular segment where I’d showcase a unique idea submitted by the community. By presenting this in a separate venue, I hope to attract fresh eyes to a feature request that was inevitably buried [...]
Where’s my “Reply to All” button? [Part 1]
I’m sure everyone who uses e-mail by now, has come to expect the standard “reply to all” button. This may come as a surprise to you but Cerb4 does not have one; at least in the traditional sense. Cerb4 is much more than two people e-mailing each other back and forth, it’s primary purpose is [...]
Helping your staff learn the Cerb4 lingo with Assist Mode
Wouldn’t it be nice to introduce new users to the most important concepts in Cerb4 right away? Yeah our developers thought so too. To answer that need they put together a comprehensive list of bullet points giving definitions to concepts old & new, explaining how they are intertwined.
You’ve no doubt already seen what I’m about [...]
When are you going to fix this?! A breakdown of Wishlist vs. Milestone
The other day I came across a thread in the forums yet again asking something akin to:
When is going to get fixed? I’ve been waiting a long time and we desperately need this implemented. What’s taking so long? Can you give me an ETA, it’s been 6 months already!
And was just [...]
Filed your request in JIRA. What does that mean?
There’s always this fear when I post in the forums that if I don’t preface “JIRA” with a long winded explanation, I’ll confuse people. I swear it’s nothing personal I think you’re all really smart! I just worry WGM has turned “JIRA” into one of the most versatile words in the English language by using [...]
Improved Cerb4 Reports
During the last month we’ve focused a lot of energy on improving the Reports area of Cerb4. The couple of token reports that existed in previous builds were more on the “experimental” side than “inspired”. From the start we knew that hacking a couple more reports into the main codebase and calling [...]
Community Manager rises to the challenge with New Blog Ideas!
My new role from the boss upstairs that I decided to undertake is Cerb4 “Community Manager”. You know, that funny job title you hear tossed around popular online companies. It’s gotten so big it’s even entered the video game space over the past decade.
So what kind of monumental changes to Cerb4 can you expect, thanks to [...]
WGM Staff Introductions — Joe Geck (Q/A Lead)
Hi Cerb4 blog readers!
I’m writing this to let you all know that you’re going to start seeing a lot more contributions submitted by yours truly. I thought I’d write this first post to introduce myself in case you ever want to know who you’re dealing with on a daily basis.
My name’s Joe Geck, nice to [...]
Cerb4 On-Demand - Planned Migrations Complete
Alright! As of tonight we should be completed with all the planned *.cerb4.com On-Demand migrations to the new network.
If you host with us and have a firewall in front of your POP3/IMAP account, ping your *.cerb4.com site and update your
Cerb4 On-Demand - Unplanned Partial Maintenance
The RAID controller/storage on one of the Cerb4 On-Demand servers started throwing constant kernel panics this morning. We decided to just quickly migrate the affected sites (about a dozen) to new hardware before we started our troubleshooting and
4.0 Build 642 is the New Stable Release
So far we’re keeping a really good pace going in development through June 2008. This is our 3rd release to the stable branch this month. I’m enjoying getting these updates out to you guys much quicker, rather than working toward arbitrary
Cerb4 Dev Diary: Tues, 24 Jun 2008 (Time Tracking, Roadmap, QA)
Things are moving pretty fast over here. Busy day!
Quality Assurance (QA)
Mike & Joe spent the day doing a full QA on Build 639 so we can push the latest changes into the stable branch. They found a couple minor things just by being
Cerb4 Developer Diary: Monday, June 23 2008
Development since last week continues to focus on performance, stability, and usability before returning to new functionality; however, we have managed to sneak in one highly requested feature and several minor tweaks.
Performance
Performance
Cerb4 On-Demand (*.cerb4.com) Upgrade Notice: Saturday June 28th
This weekend we’ll be performing the second half of our server network overhaul for our Cerb4 On-Demand service. This will affect all *.cerb4.com websites for a short time.
Here’s the plan:
We’ll be updating all helpdesks to the
On-Demand Trials, Lease-To-Own Licenses, and More For Free
Our return to flat-rate pricing has definitely been better received than our foray into per-worker licensing. We’re glad to be back.
When we were having those pricing discussions, a lot of the same interesting ideas kept coming up. So
Highlights from 4.0 Build 627 (Stable)
We’re finally delivering on our goal of making these stable releases a lot more frequent. This is the 7th update from user feedback in the stable branch for 2008, but it’s coming only a week after the last update (which was 20 days on the heels of the release before that).
I talked about Build 603’s [...]
Important! New Subversion Repository Location
Hey guys,
We’ve been meaning for a long time to upgrade the machine that our project Subversion repository is hosted on. The older machine started giving us some trouble this afternoon, so we went ahead and migrated our Subversion repositories
Major Performance Improvements - 4.0 (Build 603)
We’ve implemented a short-term/long-term caching strategy in 4.0 (Build 603) which has significantly boosted performance.
I’ve included a bit of technical information for anyone interested. If this kind of thing puts you to sleep, the above
Some Practical Security Considerations for Your Helpdesk
Alright! Earlier today I promised to share some helpdesk security tips.
If you look at the .htaccess (or .htaccess-dist) file in your /cerb4 directory, you’ll notice the following lines:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond
Important Security Patch - 4.0 (Build 600)
A security exploit has been reported that demonstrates the viewing of some helpdesk content without an active session. Please upgrade to 4.0 (Build 600) as soon as possible to correct this important issue.
The flaw has to do with how we
Hosted Helpdesk (*.cerb4.com) Upgrade Notice: Saturday May 17th
This weekend we’ll be performing some upgrades and maintenance on our Cerb4 hosted helpdesk infrastructure.
We’ll be:
Adding more RAM to the database machines.
Adding non-RAID storage to the main hosted machines. This will
Hosted Helpdesk (*.cerb4.com) Backup Policy Changes
Up until a few weeks ago we’ve been doing weekly off-site backups for our hosted helpdesk infrastructure. Local backups were done more frequently, but usually not as frequently as nightly due to performance considerations (and the fact there’s
More Pricing Tweaks (What a Bunch of Incrementalists!)
Putting a Price Tag on Bits and Bytes
Software is a tough business, but pricing software is an even tougher business. As obsessive full-time developers we often want as many people as possible to be using our projects, but we also have to strike a balance with the fact there are bills to pay and [...]
4.0 Build 593 is the New Stable Release
Alright! We’ve just done another full round of QA tests against Build 593 to confidently declare it stable. We’ve been using it live on our own helpdesk for about a week.
There are a couple dozens tweaks and improvements included, but our major focus was on bringing knowledgebase management back to the worker [...]
Debrief on the Partial Cerb4 Hosting Outage on April 28 2008
Around 1:30PM Pacific on Monday (April 28th 2008) we had one of our Cerb4 Hosted machines start writing garbage data all over its RAID drives. This corruption turned MySQL database files into directories from random fragments of the disk (website files, etc). It was a complete mess.
We lost SSH access to the box around that [...]
Guinea Pigs and Stable Releases
Since 4.0 development has been moving so quickly, we’ve just had everyone pulling the absolute latest source code from Subversion (technically called the “HEAD” revision). This was a good thing during early development because it kept us all on the same page.
However, with 4.0 no longer in beta, we really need to improve this [...]