kiosk-rb

Kiosk for student device support in Ruby

What does it do?

kiosk-rb provides a streamlined solution for an in-school kiosk for student device support, allowing students to submit issues that they encounter and technicians to log and manage these support requests.

Features:

• Simple per-school configuration
• ServiceDesk Plus integration
• Web-based user interface for remote access
• Student/administrator privileges
• Sticker printing for submitted tickets

ServiceDesk Plus Integration:

kiosk-rb uses the ServiceDesk Plus REST API in order to allow technicians to escalate tickets to a full-featured ServiceDesk Plus appliance. Ticket escalation is done through the '/sdpapi/request' POST end-point. The following fields are submitted:

• Mode: "KIOSK"
• Assets: Ticket asset tag
• Group: "IT School Interns"
• Category: "Student 1:1 Devices"
• Subcategory: "Hardware"
• Item: "Unable to browse"
• Subject: Ticket title
• Description: " (requested by via )"
• RequestTemplate: "Unable to browse"
• Priority: "Normal"
• Site: Config site_title
• Level: "Tier 3"
• Status: "open"
• Service: "Email"

Configuration Options:

• connection:
  • adapter: Type of database being used (default sqlite3)
  • database: Name of database file (default kiosk.db)
• site_name: The name of installation site on ServiceDesk (i.e. your school)
• site_title: The website title (e.g. "Riverwood Geek Squad")
• min_description_length: The minimum amount of characters for an issue description submitted by students
• initial_users: The number of administrator account keys to create on the first run of the program
• printer_name: The name of the sticker printer in CUPS
• sdp: The base URL to your ServiceDesk Plus installation
• sdpToken: The API key for your ServiceDesk Plus installation
• secret: The secret token used to encrypt session data

Setup/Installation:

• Generate an API key using ServiceDesk Plus
• Install an operating system compatible with CUPS (recommended: Alpine Linux)
• Install Ruby, Sqlite3, CUPS
• Configure your default printer using CUPS
• If using external storage media, create a kiosk account with a home directory on the external media
• Set all necessary options in the config.yml file
• Run sqlite3 kiosk.db <models/schemas/sqlite.sql to initialize the database
• Run bundle install to install all necessary packages for the program
• Start the program with rackup (recommended: make the program run on startup using your init system)