Open Campground™ Tips, Techniques and Updates
Open Campground™ Tips, Techniques and UpdatesAre you on Windows 10? Did you install from a CD? Did Windows do an update recently?
For some reason some of the Windows 10 updates remove the scripts that start the servers up on boot. If the answers to these three questions are yes the following should help get you running again.
The answer to this question will vary depending on the version of the system you currently are running. You should be able to go to admin->about to get that information. On the top line of this display it will show the version of Open Campground you are running. It will be something like or 1.10 or 1.11 or an earlier version depending on when you installed the system. If you are an Open Campground in the Cloud subscriber this process will be handled for you.
No matter which version you have the first step is to make a backup (admin->maintenance->database backup) and copy the backup to your desktop or a flash drive etc. There may be a facility to help you in admin->maintenance->manage backup files depending on which version of the system you currently have.
After the system is operational, restore from the backup you made as a first step using admin->maintenance->manager backup files->Upload Backup File and then restore from backup using the button by the proper backup.In windows explorer navigate to the folder the file was downloaded into. Select the open-campground-1.11.zip file with the right button. Select the Extract All menu item. On the next dialog click next. On the dialog entitled Select a Destination enter the place you will install the system. It must be a location where no folder above it has a space in it's name . This means it cannot be installed into your My Documents folder because there is a space in the name of that folder. I suggest you enter C:\ in the space provided. When you click the next button Windows will extract the files that make up the system into the folder you identified. This may take a few minutes depending on how fast your computer is. The folder which you have installed by this process is named InstantRails2.
Sometimes people download and install the system and InstantRails indicates two green lights but the black command window disappears as soon as it comes up and the system can not be accessed from your browser. Most times this can be corrected by bringing the system down and restarting. If this does not fix anything try the following. The command window will stay up as long as the server is running so this symptom means the server is quiting. You can see what is happening by the following:
Here is a suggestion submitted by one of the Open Campground users. If you have the common situation where you get your internet from the cable or phone company and you do not have a static internet address, there is a way to access your Open Campground system from home or to even use the remote reservations feature so guests can make their own reservations.
The reservation numbers in Open Campground are auto incrementing numbers. They generally start at 1 and increment from there. This procedure will enable you to cause the numbers to start at another value. This process will work on any version of Open Campground. If reservations have been created in the system do not attempt to start the numbers at a lower value than the latest reservation.
rails_apps>mysql -u root campground mysql> insert into reservations set id = 550; mysql> delete from reservations where id = 550; mysql> exit; rails_apps>exit
The header and trailer are just normal html code. If you know html you are a step ahead. The font size is defined by a value called
<font size="2">The rest of your trailer text.Then save and see how it prints out. Other changes like font face can also be made in this way. You can also insert any html element like <b> for bold or <em> for italic. Make sure you terminate the bold or italic with a </b> or </em>. If you would like to put in a signature element at the bottom of the page use a series of underlines (above the hyphen on the keyboard) to put in the signature line. With version 1.10 of Open Campground the previous limitations on the size of the header and trailer have been removed so you can make them about as long as you want.
Please read this whole section and do not attempt this unless you understand all of the instructions given. If you have questions send me an email at problems@opencampground.com.
First you must create a spreadsheet containing the old customer data. The spreadsheet must have the following columns in this order.
| first_name | last_name | address | 2nd address line | city | state | mail code | phone number | 2nd phone number | email address | id number |
All columns must be there but they do not have to be used. You should make a top row with those header names. This will result in an entry in the camper database with the name 'first_name last_name' which you can delete when you are finished. The only field that is required to have data is the last name and any fields that you have set in setup->system options as required. When you have the data in your spreadsheet to your satisfaction, save it as a csv file. In Open Office you will use file->save as. The file name must be Campers.csv. Select text CSV as the file type. Select ; (semi-colon) as the field delimiter. Select blank as the text delimiter. Select unicode (UTF-8) as the character set.
Here is what the spreadsheet will look like if you open it in notepad or a similar editor.
first_name;last_name;address;2nd address;city;state;mail code;phone;phone 2;email address;id_number Randolph;Allen;56 Crooked Lane;;Shokapee;MN;;;;; Test;Camper;456 Rainbow Drive;Box 345;Livingston;TX;77399;512 555-1212;817 123-4567;test@gmail.com;12345 Mary;Foley;79 Leytonstone Road;;London;;E15 1JA;01632 123456;;foley@abc.uk.com; Tony;Jackson;123 Main Street;Suite 4567;Longview;TX;77399;;;; Jack;Jasperson;123 Main Street #11223;;Longview;TX;77399;;;; Tony;Jones;123 Main Street #11223;;Longview;TX;77399;;;;
If you are a subscriber to Open Campground in the Cloud mail me the spreadsheet at norm@opencampground.com. Otherwise continue on with the rest of this process.
Download csv_import.rake to C:/InstantRails2/rails_apps/opencampground_1.11/lib/tasks/csv_import.rake. The Campers.csv file should be copied to C:/InstantRails2/rails_apps/opencampground_1.11. In both cases the file locations assume you used the default installation locations. If you did not you will have to adjust the locations accordingly. Bring up InstantRails and select the bold I in the upper left which will bring up a menu on which you will select Ruby console window. In the command window cd to opencampground_1.11 and enter the command rake db:load_campers_from_csv. This will enter the data into the training database. You should check the campers in that database to see that you got what you wanted.
If you are satisfied with the results use the command rake db:load_campers_from_csv RAILS_ENV=production to load the data into the production database.
Your guest wants a reservation for the month of July so you make a reservation for 1 - 31 July. Open Campground shows that this reservation is for 4 weeks and 2 days and computes that rate instead of the monthly rate.
This is correct. The dates for the reservation are the arrival date (which is a date the site is occupied) and the departure date (which is not a date the site is occupied). If you make a reservation starting 1 July and ending 31 July thirty nights of occupancy are computed. The meaning of a reservation ending on 31 July is that you are leaving on 31 July and will not occupy the site the night of the 31st therefore the reservation is for only 30 days not a month. A one month reservation ends on the same day of the month it starts on. The site is counted as available on the end date of the reservation and a new reservation can have that date as it's start date.
Some people installing the system on a Windows system have had problems if they have multiple user logins on the system. If this is the type of configuration you have the following steps will help you.
Open Campground will run on any linux or similar system that has Ruby 1.8.7 and other programs needed to support Ruby on Rails. This script will install Open Campground on Ubuntu LTS systems (12.04 and 14.04) and on debian squeeze and wheezy (6.0 and 7.0). To use this script you must be authorized to use sudo. After downloading the script execute it (sh OCinstall.sh) in a directory where you want Open Campground to be installed.
This will completely work only if you do not put a password on the mysql database. If you put a password on the mysql database you will have to modify opencampground-1.11/config/database.yml to use the password after Open Campground is downloaded and before the databases are set up. This has been tested and works on Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04 LTS Servers and on debian wheezy and squeeze. For other releases and distributions changes may be required.
When the script completes you should test the system. cd to the opencampground-1.11 directory and enter script/server. You can now accesss the url http://localhost:3000 with any browser and you should get the Open Campground pages.
Apache2 with Passenger gives you a very useful system setup for running Open Campground. To run this you must have a unix/linux like system. This would include any Linux distribution, BSD and MacOS. Passenger does not run on Windows systems. On Ubuntu LTS or debian systems this script should set up the software needed for Passenger. It requires that supporting software as installed above be present.
You then must configure Passenger. Here is a copy of a virtual hosts file I have used which works well. Note the comment about the version of Apache. With later versions changes are needed. It is installed in /etc/apache2/sites-available. It assumes that there is a user called oc (modify the script as needed to correspond to reality) with a home directory called /home/oc in which the Open Campground software sits in a directory called OpenCampground_1.11. You will have to vary the ServerName, Directory, DocumentRoot and RailsEnv definitions to fit your system. The ServerName is the name the server is accessed by so you will have to put a definition in your dns system or /etc/hosts for this hostname. What I do on my local network is just edit /etc/hosts to add another name for my system so the hosts file looks like this:
127.0.0.1 localhost opencampground . . .You can add the entry for the system hosting the server to the /etc/hosts (hosts.txt in c:\windows\system somewhere on Windows) file that you want to access the server from. You will have to access the server by name (not ip address) because that is what is used to distinguish the virtual hosts. When you access http://opencampground it will use the information in the virtual host file to figure out what to run. The ServerName must correspond to the name used to access it.
You will enable the host with the command 'sudo a2ensite opencampground.conf' and then will have to reload apache with 'sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload'. To restart the virtual host touch the file /home/oc/opencampground-1.11/tmp/restart.txt. The procedure on any other Unix/Linux like system will be similar but names of packages may vary a bit.
I am no expert on Cpanel but I can give some experience on setting up a system hosted on a web server using Cpanel for administration. This system was configured with Cpanel version 11.34.0 and it was set up to support Ruby on Rails 2.3.14 which is the version of Rails Open Campground is built on.
It was found that some required gems were not available and had to be installed.
These included the mysql gem and the rdoc gem. When these gems are installed using Cpanel they get installed in
a location under your user account instead of in the normal location so a modification has to be made to tell
Rails to look in that location for the gem. There are instructions on the Cpanel gems page that purport to tell
you what to do but they work only with version 1.x of Ruby on Rails and do not work with later versions so they
should be ignored. The following line should be inserted into the file
[installation location]/config/environment.rb anyplace in the first 10 lines.
ENV['GEM_PATH'] = 'path to gems:/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8'
In this path to gems will be the place where user installed gems are installed on your system.
In the system I looked at this was /home/username/ruby/gems.
You can start the install by following the normal Cpanel steps for defining a
Ruby on Rails application and when that is complete download the source version
of Open Campground and copy it on top of the application you have defined.
If you do that you will have to remove or rename the file
[install location]/public/index.html or else you will get the
Ruby on Rails: Welcome aboard page.
If you see this page you will know you need to get rid of index.html.
If your system has a later version of the rake gem than that specified in the Open Campground User Manual you may see a series of complaints in the log file at startup. These messages will only be put in the log file at startup and the messages are of no importance to Open Campground operation and should be disregarded.
In update 1275 the capability to display a campground map on the space selection display was added. This is intended to give you some information on how to use that facility.
First you need a campground map. It can be created any way you want but must be either a .jpg or .png file. You probably have one that you use to direct campers to their site. You can scan that in and it should work. Some experimentation may be required to decide what map looks best on your display. The map will be displayed on the site selection page and will take up about 55% of the page leaving 45% for the textual area. You can modify this somewhat by the choice of what to display on the site selection page. You can get the most space for the map if you turn off display of site length and select navigate by tabs (both in admin->setup->system options). The map will be displayed at its actual size with scroll bars so you can see it all.
To set-up to use the map, get a .jpg or .png file on your computer somewhere you can find it. You then go to admin->setup->system options and select edit. On the edit display select 'Display Park Map' and then save. You will now find that there is another button in the setup group labeled 'Map'. Select that button and you will be shown a fairly simple display. At the label 'Map File' click Browse and find and select your chosen map file. When that is selected, click on 'Upload Map File' and the file will be ready to use. Start the reservation process to see what it looks like.
The same process is used for a map on the remote display except in that case the label will be 'Remote Map File'. Be aware that on the remote display you have no idea what kind of display the user has. It may be bigger or smaller than what you use so you should allow for that as much as you can. There will be scroll bars if it is too wide for the display. You can use the same or different maps for the local and remote display. The two displays are independent so you can select either or both or neither.
In your gmail account under "My Account" you must go to "Sign-in & Security" and in that area set "Allow less secure apps:" to ON.
If you have set email up as described in appendix G of the Users Manual and your gmail account information is correct you might see a cryptic error message like "534-5.7.14" If you see this the corrective action is to log on to your gmail account and change your gmail account security settings to enable "Access for less secure apps"
Windows 7/10 problems with gmailIn addition to the above it has been found that there is a problem setting up email using gmail on Windows 7 or 10 systems. Windows 8 is no doubt also affected but I have not tested that. The issue is a Windows code compatability issue. The symptom is that the system will not send email using smtp.gmail.com even when correctly configured as described in the appendix to the Users Manual. It may or may not affect other mail servers depending on the specific setup they use.
To correct the problem you will have to have admin priviledges on your Windows system.