[ledgersmb-users] Re: Initial installation

Hi Howard,

Welcome to our mailing list!

A bit of background: Albury Men's Shed is part of the Australian Men's Shed Association 🇦🇺 catering for manual activities for older men (there is a women's side too).
They want to move to computer based book keeping and I am promoting LedgerSMB as a simple, user friendly solution having previously used SQL-Ledger in my business.

Thank you for your support!

I am encouraging them to use a Raspberry Pi 400 as a low cost, stand alone, solution, avoiding the horrors of the office M$ 10.

The RPi400 has Raspbios installed (essentially Debian 11 Bullseye) and I have added apache2 and postgresql and LedgerSMB from the Raspberry repositories. I notice that the postgresql installation is both v11 and v13, but the LedgerSMB installed is only v1.6.9.

Unfortunately, yes, Bullseye would mean 1.6.9 from the repository. Bookworm has 1.6.33 (See https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ledgersmb) although that too isn't a version I'd encourage: it's beyond support for a long time already. I really want to submit more recent packages to the Debian repository, but I'm afraid I don't have the time and don't know how to deal with the _javascript_ that's included in our distribution archive. So, instead, we've been working on Docker containers which people on any distribution can use.

I have the Apache server set up as a reverse proxy and can get locahost:5762/login.pl and local host:5762/setup.pl to come up.
During the installation of LedgerSMB I was offered lsmb_dbadmin as the database admin user; does this replace the more traditional postgres as the master admin, or is this additional.

The idea is that using lsmb_dbadmin is safer than using postgres: if you create the lsmb_dbadmin user as per the instructions in https://ledgersmb.org/content/installing-ledgersmb-111, that user has fewer rights than the postgres user. The latter is a superuser which has all the rights in the world. The former has a lot of rights, but isn't a superuser, meaning that it can't get into databases it didn't create. Thus protecting your "other data" in case your lsmb_dbadmin user would ever get compromised.

I recall seeing somewhere that there may be a clash between some earlier LedgerSMB versions and later postgresql versions.

As for database compatibility: the 1.6.33 version in Debian has patches to work around incompatibility with Pg 14 and higher. These versions are Pg 14+ compatible:

* 1.7.41

* 1.8.31

* 1.9.16

* all versions 1.10.0 and higher

I do have the doco from the book site and will spend the weekend working with that (rain is forecast for the next 4 days 😭).
Any guiding comments are welcomed.

Well, if you have further questions, please feel free either to post to this list, or to join our chat channel at https://app.element.io/#/room/#ledgersmb:matrix.org ; we're around lots of the time, although depending on many factors, responses may lag by a few hours.

Regards,

Bye,

Erik.

http://efficito.com -- Hosted accounting and ERP.

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