Restricting Public Access

By default, SupportPal expects your help desk to be available to the public.

If you intend to keep your installation private behind a firewall then you'll need to make some changes in order to ensure customers can access email attachments and more. Before proceeding with this approach though, you should be aware of its shortcomings:

• Only png, jpeg and gif image types can be embedded, all other types will be added as attachments.
• By default, a cumulative embed limit of 10 MB exists (this is separate to the Cumulative Attachment Limit setting in the operator panel). Any embedded images which exceed this size will be added as attachments.
• Potential memory and performance issues when sending large attachments via the cron job. The larger the images/attachments that you choose to accept, the higher the likelihood that you'll run into such issues. Thus it's important to decide on sensible values when configuring the below settings.

If you're happy with the above shortcomings, then please follow the below steps to use SupportPal behind a firewall.

1. Edit your MySQL configuration file:
   1. Set a sensible max_allowed_packet. Embedded images tend to use up to three times the size of the original image size, for example a 3 MB image would be 9 MB when embedded.
2. Edit your PHP configuration file for both web server and the cron (these are usually two separate files):
   1. Set a sensible upload_max_filesize. This will prevent users/operators from uploading large files, we would recommend to keep this below 10M.
   2. Ensure post_max_size is larger than or equal to upload_max_size.
   3. Ensure memory_limit is above upload_max_filesize and post_max_size. You may wish to disable the memory_limit completely on the cron. As mentioned above, sending a 30 MB attachment via email may require ~90 MB so this can rapidly increase when there are multiple large attachments/images.
3. Edit SupportPal settings:
   1. Browse to Settings > General > Email in the operator panel and increase/disable the Cumulative Attachment Limit.
      Any attachments which exceed the limit will not be attached. If you choose to disable the cumulative attachment limit then you must ensure you have sufficient memory on your server to handle sending large attachments. The speed of the cron job will also dramatically slow down.
   2. Browse to Settings > Tickets > General and adjust/disable the Allowed Attachment File Types to account for additional image formats (tiff, bmp, webp, etc). Otherwise the user will receive a notification saying that certain attachments / images could not be processed.
   3. Edit config/production/app.php and set embed_data_uri to true.
      For more information on modifying configuration files, please read: Updating Config Files