Printing to a Printer from a Windows Server
There are several obstacles to printing from a web appliction that was written for Linux or UNIX in Windows. These include:
- Lack of Postscript support in the printing subsystem. To resolve this, you must install Ghostscript and Gsview. The latter package provides a utility called gsprint that will allow you to print Postscript on your Windows printer.
- The fact that most Windows software, including gsprint, tends to print output that will cause the web server to crash. The winprint.bat included with this distribution corrects this problem. To use the winprint.bat solution, configure your printers in your ledger-smb.conf as "winprint.bat printer-name." If you omit the printer name, the default printer will be used.
- Windows does not allow you to set up system printers that all users can access. Thus the web server often doesn't have access to the printers you have set up. To correct this issue, follow the steps at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q184291/.

Error on converting from SQL-Ledger: ERROR: column "chart_id" contains null values
SQL-Ledger does not enforce a NOT NULL constraint on the chart_id field in the acc_trans table. Consequently, it is possible in cirtain circumstances to insert transactions into the database with invalid information including NULL chart_id's. When this occurs, normally the Chart of Accounts and Trial Balance will fail to balance. So this is a serious problem with data integrity. LedgerSMB prevents this by adding the NOT NULL constraing but this can cause prevent people from migrating when they have invalid data in their databases.

If you encounter an error like this, the first thing to do is seek technical support, regardless of whether or not you wish to continue the migration. In general the providers of support for LedgerSMB and SQL-Ledger should all be able to be of some assistance. Unfortunately, since this problem involves information loss, no solution can be automated without invalidating your accounting information.

Restoring old SQL-Ledger backups

PostgreSQL added a restriction in v8.x that a sequence cannot be dropped after if it is referenced by a table. However backups created with SQL-Ledger v2.6.13 and earlier have a DROP SEQUENCE step in the backup which will fail. To fix this edit the backup before restoring on a 8.x system.

This typically looks like this:

DROP SEQUENCE id ;
CREATE SEQUENCE id START 10579;
--
DROP SEQUENCE invoiceid ;
CREATE SEQUENCE invoiceid START 11096;
--
DROP SEQUENCE orderitemsid ;
CREATE SEQUENCE orderitemsid START 178;
--
DROP SEQUENCE jcitemsid ;
CREATE SEQUENCE jcitemsid START 53;

Change it to:

CREATE SEQUENCE id;
SELECT SETVAL('id', 10579);
CREATE SEQUENCE invoiceid;
SELECT SETVAL('invoiceid', 11096);
CREATE SEQUENCE orderitemsid;
SELECT SETVAL('orderitemsid', 178);
CREATE SEQUENCE jcitemsid;
SELECT SETVAL('jcitemsid', 53);

PostgreSQL template1
template1 is a template that new databases are built from, by default. Anything you put into template1 will be copied to a new database. Thus, when you try to create a new dataset, the tables are already drawn in from template1 so that when LedgerSMB tries to create them, you will receive an error message indicating that the tables already exist.
Japanese characters
modify apache so that EUC_JP is the main additional language.
comment out all unrelated languages except, UTF_8 shift jis, EUC_JP
restart apache
Fire up psql and do the encoding as per the table:-
Table 5-2. Postgres Client/Server Character Set Encodings
Server Encoding Available Client Encodings
EUC_JP EUC_JP, SJIS
EUC_TW EUC_TW, BIG5
LATIN2 LATIN2, WIN1250
LATIN5 LATIN5, WIN, ALT
MULE_INTERNAL EUC_JP, SJIS, EUC_KR, EUC_CN, EUC_TW, BIG5, LATIN1 to LATIN5, WIN, ALT, WIN1250
Create the dataset from admin.pl, now the Japanese shows up in multibyte encoding
Now you can write in Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji and English
Error posting a check/receipt
```
DBD::Pg::db do failed: ERROR: syntax error at or near "," at character 114
Error!
INSERT INTO acc_trans (trans_id, chart_id, transdate,amount)
VALUES (13314, , '03-22-2005',1.00 * 1)
ERROR: syntax error at or near "," at character 114 
```
This error is caused by a transaction which does not have links to an AR/AP account.
set up your chart of accounts properly and create at least one AR and AP account. Then edit all your transactions and repost.
SELinux
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/selinux-faq-fc3/index.html
modify /etc/selinux/conf and set SELINUX=permissive
use audit2allow, add the following to policy.conf, then run make reload
#line 83
allow httpd_sys_script_t port_type:{ tcp_socket udp_socket } { send_msg recv_msg };
allow httpd_sys_script_t sysctl_kernel_t:dir search;
allow httpd_sys_script_t sysctl_t:dir search;
allow httpd_sys_script_t tmp_t:sock_file write;
allow httpd_sys_script_t httpd_sys_content_t:lnk_file read;
allow httpd_sys_script_t sysctl_kernel_t:file read;
allow httpd_sys_script_t unconfined_t:unix_stream_socket connectto;
session timeouts
If you get frequent timeouts or can't even log in, synchronize the clocks between the server and workstation.
lineitems not printing
Templates designed on a UNIX platform don't work on a DOS platform. To make them work load the template either with the builtin template editor or a text editor and save. Templates designed on a Windows platform have the same problem and won't work on a UNIX platform. Once you strip the ^M's the'll work just fine.
Note too that most Linux and UNIX installations come with two utilities for making these conversions: unix2dos and dos2unix. Windows users can obtain these utilities as part of Cygwin.
UTF-8 character encoding
Most of the translations are in ISO format. To convert the translations change directory to locale/cc and convert the files with iconv to UTF-8. You should also convert the COAs too and make sure you select UTF-8 encoding when you set up a new dataset.
characterset problems
If you have problems displaying the correct characterset try adding
```
AddDefaultCharset On
```
in your httpd.conf file.
About installation
The easiest is to use the setup.pl script as root. You don't need to know very much about your system, just login as root, run 'perl setup.pl' and follow the prompts.
setup.pl does not check for missing software packages and it is your responsibility to make sure you have the required software installed either from source or from a package.
Requirements are clearly indicated in the README file and on the download page.
cannot create function
1. either run createlang plpgsql to install the plpgsql language handler or install yourself. For more information how to do that, visit PostgreSQL and read the interactive documentation for procedural languages.
2. load admin.pl
3. unlock the system
4. login
The requested URL /ledger-smb/admin.pl was not found
Your webserver doesn't know where to find the script. Most commonly this results when distributions hide webserver configuration files in unexpected locations so that setup.pl wasn't able to configure the location for you. Find out which file (httpd.conf, httpdcommon.conf, ...) controls your webserver configuration and add
```
  # LedgerSMB
  Include /etc/httpd/ledger-smb-httpd.conf
```
Create a file 'ledger-smb-httpd.conf' in /etc/httpd and copy the next part into the file.
```
  AddHandler cgi-script .pl
  AddDefaultCharset On
  Alias /ledger-smb /var/www/ledger-smb/
  <Directory /var/www/ledger-smb>
    Options ExecCGI Includes FollowSymlinks
  </Directory>

  <Directory /var/www/ledger-smb/users>
    Order Deny,Allow
    Deny from All
  </Directory>
```
replace '/etc/httpd' and '/var/www' with the appropriate directories.
users/members : Permission denied
Your webserver must have write access to the users directory. If your server runs as user/group 'apache:apache' then set the users directory to owner/group apache:apache.
```
  # chown -R apache:apache users
```
Dataset newer than version
You are trying to use an older version with a dataset which was created with a newer version.
PDF option not working
Check if you have latex and pdflatex installed.
Apache 2.0 "error 500"
Some of the early versions of Apache 2.0 (< patchlevel 44) had a rewrite engine which decoded escaped strings. This created a lot of problems and I worked around it by escaping strings twice. If you get a server 500 error 'filename too long' or if collapsed menus don't expand you may have to adjusted the following code in LSMB/Form.pm and change the number (44) on line 84.
```
  # for Apache 2 we escape strings twice
  if (($ENV{SERVER_SIGNATURE} =~ /Apache\/2\.(\d+)\.(\d+)/) && !$beenthere) {
    $str = $self->escape($str, 1) if $2 < 44;
  }
```
IDENT Authentication failed for user "ledger-smb"
Edit pg_hba.conf and change authentication to
```
  local           all        all           MD5
```
The file is in the 'data' directory of your postgresql installation. This is different with every distribution so look for it.
```
  # find / -name 'pg_hba.conf'
```
Some people can't read and seem to think 'localhost' is just some fancy word for a local machine. 'localhost' is a host like any other host on a network. A 'local' entry in pg_hba.conf will allow socket connections ONLY and not allow a host connection. If you then try to connect to 'localhost', PostgreSQL will come back with an authentication error.
So, if the database resides on the same server as the web server, forget you ever heard there is such a thing as 'localhost' and leave the Host portion blank.
WARNING! DO NOT just put a 'host all all trust' in pg_hba.conf unless you know what you are doing; that can introduce a pretty huge security hole.
DBD-Pg for Mandrake 9.0
Mandrake did not package a compiled DBD-Pg package again, so install DBD-Pg from the source package. Install perl-DBD-Pg-1.01-4mdk.i586.rpm from the 'contrib' area. (Mandrake / 9.0 / contrib / RPMS)
LaTeX error
If for some reason LaTeX produces an error message check for strange characters in your account description and parts description and use \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc} in the preamble.
LaTeX templates
If you don't want to edit tex code by hand, you could use Lyx, Abiword, or any WYSIWYG editor capable of exporting latex code.
LaTeX is somewhat complex to learn, initially, but offers a much superior environment to produce professional-looking forms in postscript and PDF format.
PDF option disappeared
Edit ledger-smb.conf and set: latex = 1
Installation on Windows (WIN32)
- install Apache, perl, Postgres or Oracle, DBI and the appropriate DBD module
  if you can't compile DBD-Pg here is a precompiled DBD-Pg module
- download the latest version of LedgerSMB
- extract the files to c:\apache\ledger-smb
- run 'perl shebang' to change the first line of the scripts. If perl is not in c:\perl\bin' change '#!c:\\perl\\bin\\perl' to the location where your perl binary is.
- edit c:\apache\conf\httpd.conf and add
```
Alias /ledger-smb "c:/apache/ledger-smb/"
<Directory "c:/apache/ledger-smb">
  AllowOverride All
  AddHandler cgi-script .pl
  AddDefaultCharset On
  Options +ExecCGI
  Order Allow,Deny
  Allow from All
</Directory>

<Directory "c:/apache/ledger-smb/users">
  Order Deny,Allow
  Deny from All
</Directory>
```
- start Apache
- start Postgres|Oracle|DB2
- connect to http://localhost/ledger-smb/admin.pl and set up users and datasets
- connect to http://localhost/ledger-smb/login.pl and login
What do I enter for the language
If you use English, nothing, if you want to use a foreign language for the login screen and admin stuff enter the language code, this is the directory in the locale directory.
printing to a printer
Printers are defined in ledger-smb.conf
```
%printer = ( 'Default' => 'lpr', 'Color' => 'lpr -PEpson' );
```
Check in your /etc/printcap file for the names of available printers.
If you have LaTeX installed set
```
  $latex = 1
```
in ledger-smb.conf
To send the document to the printer check the "Postscript" or "PDF" format, enter the number of copies and click on the "Print" button.
The printer you enter in your preferences is the default printer. You can choose any other available printer. This makes it possible to print from anywhere on the network to any printer.
Note: html format is for screen preview. Use the "Print" option from your browser to print to a printer.

Using samba to send printjobs to a printer attached to a Windows XP workstation

The next part applies to roll your own print filters only. If you use CUPS or LPRng your milage may vary but you can still use this as a guide how it works. I use the printer 'Epson' as an example which is attached to a XP workstation called Raven.

/etc/printcap entry on the server which runs lpd
 
epson:Epson\
  :sh:\
  :lp=/dev/null:\
  :sd=/var/spool/output/epson:\
  :if=/usr/libexec/lpr/epson/prnfilter:\

# end of entry in /etc/printcap


# prnfilter shell script
#!/bin/sh
# Filter for Epson Stylus

PATH="$PATH:/usr/local/bin"

#read first_line
read tmp
first_line=`echo $tmp | cut -b1-2 | sed -n '1p'`

first_chr=`expr "$first_line" : '\(.\)'`
first_two=`expr "$first_line" : '\(..\)'`
rewindstdin

if [ "$first_two" = "%!" ]; then # Postscript file
  gs @st640p.upp -dSAFER -dNOPAUSE -q -sOutputFile=/tmp/$$ -
else
  # text file
  cat > /tmp/$$
  echo -n "^L" >> /tmp/$$
  smbclient '\\Raven\Epson' "" -c 'printmode text'
fi

smbclient '\\Raven\Epson' "" -P -c "print /tmp/$$"
rm /tmp/$$

# EOF


rewindstdin is a small program to rewind the filehandle for STDIN
save the next part up to EOF to a file rewindstdin.c and compile

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <unistd.h>
extern int errno;
main()
{
  if( lseek(0,0,0) == 0 ){
    errno = 0;
  }
  return( errno );
}

# EOF

compile to an executable

gcc -o /usr/local/bin/rewindstdin rewindstdin.c

beginning balances
Add a GL Journal entry and enter the beginning balance for your accounts. Beginning balances are the balances from your last balance sheet. If you also add open invoices to account for COGS for inventory, add the invoices and make the appropriate adjustments.
establish a beginning inventory
add the parts with a vendor invoice. Use the real cost for the items, not zero. If you use zero cost then the cost of goods will be zero when you sell the item.
Assemblies
Assemblies are manufactured goods assembled from parts, services and assemblies. Because you do not buy assemblies you 'stock assemblies' by adding assembled units to your inventory. The quantity for individual parts is reduced and the quantity for the assembly increased. To disassemble an assembly you simply return the parts to inventory by entering a negative quantity for the number of assemblies to stock.
DBD-Pg not installed
Most modern distributions now package DBD-Pg. If it is not packaged follow this recipe to get it working.
- check if you have the header files for PostgreSQL
  $ find / -name 'libpq-fe.h'
  if nothing shows up install the development package for PostgreSQL
- download and untar DBD-Pg
- set the environment variables POSTGRES_LIB and POSTGRES_INCLUDE
- cd to DBD-Pg directory
  as ordinary user
  $ perl Makefile.PL
  $ make
  $ make test
  if all went well su to root
  # make install
- remove DBD-Pg
login.pl has compilation error
This could be because of a missing configuration file in the users directory
check the permission for the users directory. The directory must be set writeable for the webserver. If your webserver runs ias user/group nobody.nogroup set the directory to
```
drwx--x--x   2 nobody   nogroup    1024 May 26 16:49 users

or

drwxrwx--x   2 johndoe  nogroup    1024 May 26 16:49 users
```
script not executing, shows in browser instead
Add
```
  AddHandler cgi-script .pl
```
in your httpd.conf file.
permission denied
Check if your web server has write permission to write to the following files and directories:
```
  users/
  templates/
  users/members

  # chown nobody:nogroup users templates users/members
```
permission denied to access tables
The user you entered in the "Database section" must be a valid database user who has rights to access the tables.
If the tables are owned by 'joe' and you enter 'mary' as the dba you might run into this problem if mary doesn't have the rights to access tables owned by joe.
html and graphics files don't show up on screen
Enable Includes and FollowSymlinks Options in your httpd.conf file
```
  <Directory /usr/local/ledger-smb>
    Options ExecCGI Includes FollowSymlinks
  </Directory>
```
switch display to a foreign language
Load your preferences and select the language.
Language selection is in accordance to ISO 3166-1 standards.
Text shows in English when I use a foreign language
This is because the corresponding hash entry is missing. Add the missing text in the locale/cc/all or locale/cc/missing file and run 'perl locales.pl' from the command line to rebuild the individual files.
cc refers to the country code.
switch to a foreign language for the login and admin screen
Edit ledger-smb.conf and enter the code for the $language variable
```
  $language = "de";
```
This is a global change and applies to all logins, individual settings may be changed by setting the language in your Preferences.

LedgerSMB security

The security features built into LedgerSMB provide encrypted passwords and access control which makes it fairly safe out of the box to run even in front of a firewall. Some precautions which are out of our control must be taken though. It matters where you install LSMB and how you configure your web server and SQL server.

  Typical setups:
  
  /usr/local/vh/www                   <- DocumentRoot for virtual host
  /usr/local/vh/ledger-smb            <- Alias for ledger-smb
  /usr/local/vh/users                 <- users directory out of reach


  /usr/local/vh/www                   <- DocumentRoot for virtual host
  /usr/local/vh/www/ledger-smb        <- Alias for ledger-smb
  /usr/local/vh/www/ledger-smb/users  <- users configuration files and tmp space

  <Directory /usr/local/vh/www/ledger-smb/users>  <- disable webserver access
    Order Deny,Allow                                 for users directory
    Deny from All
  </Directory>

The location for the users directory can be specified in ledger-smb.conf

Set permission for the users and templates directory to 711
If you do not want anyone to change the templates with the built-in editor set the files in templates/directory/ to read only or disable the menu item to edit the templates.
You can set up a read-only environment if you disable the menu items to add data. i.e 'Add Transaction' if unchecked you will not be able to add a transaction or repost a transaction. You may look at it but nothing else.
There are various settings for audit control and you may disable reposting entirely or up to a certain date. And with the audit trail enabled you can keep tab of who is doing what.
For PostgreSQL you may also set who has access to the server in the file pg_hba.conf
in addition you can secure the tables from unauthorized access by setting up a different database user and GRANT rights. For instance, users without DELETE rights will still be able to use the program, change customers and vendors, add transactions but will not be able to delete or repost transactions.
To lock all the tables to create a RO system GRANT SELECT rights only.
Other security options include a secure shell, your webserver's authentication system, SSL, encrypted tunnels, ...

Printing to a Printer from a Windows Server

Error on converting from SQL-Ledger: ERROR: column "chart_id" contains null values

Restoring old SQL-Ledger backups

PostgreSQL template1

Japanese characters

Error posting a check/receipt

SELinux

session timeouts

lineitems not printing

UTF-8 character encoding

characterset problems

About installation

cannot create function

The requested URL /ledger-smb/admin.pl was not found

users/members : Permission denied

Dataset newer than version

PDF option not working

Apache 2.0 "error 500"

IDENT Authentication failed for user "ledger-smb"

DBD-Pg for Mandrake 9.0

LaTeX error

LaTeX templates

PDF option disappeared

Installation on Windows (WIN32)

What do I enter for the language

printing to a printer

Using samba to send printjobs to a printer attached to a Windows XP workstation

beginning balances

establish a beginning inventory

Assemblies

DBD-Pg not installed

login.pl has compilation error

script not executing, shows in browser instead

permission denied

permission denied to access tables

html and graphics files don't show up on screen

switch display to a foreign language

Text shows in English when I use a foreign language

switch to a foreign language for the login and admin screen

LedgerSMB security