Pre-Configured Appliances for Rent

[INUMIO-Rob]

We have three different hardware firewall appliance types for rent to our dedicated server customers. These are preconfigured with username / password, and are live (ready for production). When the customer rents the appliance, I need Blesta to provide them the unique credentials for the appliance they purchased. Can be done via client area, and / or email?

Is it possible with Blesta, out of the box?

 

Cheers

[Paul]

Automating this by pulling from a pool of credentials would require a simple module. Doing it in the way Mike describes, requires staff to manually enter the information before accepting the order. With a module, you could pull these credentials out of MySQL or a text file and provision automatically.

So, the answer is, out of the box you can but you have to manually enter the credentials before approving the order. To do so automatically, you need a simple custom module. There are some developers on the forums here that can help you out with a custom module for probably not too much if you want to go that route.

[Michael]

You can make addon products, and when someone orders that addon product you can have fields which show up using the Universal Module. You can then enter the username and password: How can I sell a product without a module?

[INUMIO-Rob]

7 hours ago, Licensecart said:

You can make addon products, and when someone orders that addon product you can have fields which show up using the Universal Module. You can then enter the username and password: How can I sell a product without a module?

Thanks for your reply. I wish for these firewalls to be stand-alone products.

I'm a bit confused still if this is possible; to present the pre-configured appliance types (3 types) as stand-alone products. If a customer orders type "Firewall A", blesta draws from the inventory of that firewall type (if inventory exists), and (here's the important bit) once the payment is approved, the customer is provided the unique login credentials which I have pre-created when we deployed the device, not credentials created by the customer.

The take-home point is that each device has unique login credentials preconfigured, thus I need to create pools of these appliances each as a product with unique attributes.

You clearly provide a huge amount of support here in the forum. Thanks for that effort.

[Michael]

1 hour ago, INUMIO-Rob said:

Thanks for your reply. I wish for these firewalls to be stand-alone products.

I'm a bit confused still if this is possible; to present the pre-configured appliance types (3 types) as stand-alone products. If a customer orders type "Firewall A", blesta draws from the inventory of that firewall type (if inventory exists), and (here's the important bit) once the payment is approved, the customer is provided the unique login credentials which I have pre-created when we deployed the device, not credentials created by the customer.

Awesome so you want to make a "package" and use the universal module with 3 fields (I think) as so:

URL (provided after):
Username:
Password:

And set the order form to "Require Manual Review and Approval of All Orders" then after you get an order, you can accept the order on the Billing tab on the Order Widget.

Then go to the client profile and click on pending > manage and enter the details and click save.

[INUMIO-Rob]

8 minutes ago, Paul said:

Automating this by pulling from a pool of credentials would require a simple module. Doing it in the way Mike describes, requires staff to manually enter the information before accepting the order. With a module, you could pull these credentials out of MySQL or a text file and provision automatically.

So, the answer is, out of the box you can but you have to manually enter the credentials before approving the order. To do so automatically, you need a simple custom module. There are some developers on the forums here that can help you out with a custom module for probably not too much if you want to go that route.

Yes, we need this automated.

What is the best way to find an experienced, proven blesta dev that can talk with me about module specifications, and provide a quote? Looking for dev recommendations, I suppose.

 

Thanks guys.

[Paul]

@PauloV @naja7host @timnboys <- One of these guys may be able to help you.

[INUMIO-Rob]

We only have eight of these appliances to rent. Is it not possible to configure each one as a product with it's own custom welcome email that could include the login credentials? In other words, can I create eight products, each with a stock level of 1, so when it is rented we send the email, and the product goes inactive or out-of-stock?

[Michael]

33 minutes ago, INUMIO-Rob said:

We only have eight of these appliances to rent. Is it not possible to configure each one as a product with it's own custom welcome email that could include the login credentials? In other words, can I create eight products, each with a stock level of 1, so when it is rented we send the email, and the product goes inactive or out-of-stock?

You can put the Quality as 8 and then it won't be able to order.

[Paul]

1 hour ago, INUMIO-Rob said:

We only have eight of these appliances to rent. Is it not possible to configure each one as a product with it's own custom welcome email that could include the login credentials? In other words, can I create eight products, each with a stock level of 1, so when it is rented we send the email, and the product goes inactive or out-of-stock?

Yes, you can certainly do that. Mike mentions putting the quantity to 8, but this won't accomplish what you want which is to send the unique credentials to the user. If you create 8 packages with a quantity available of 1 you can accomplish this. The user will see 8 possible packages during checkout though, which might be confusing. After the packages are ordered, mark them as inactive.

[INUMIO-Rob]

@Paul Thanks very much for the reply. We'll label the packages with enough verbosity to avoid confusion. I'm glad to hear that this might be a solution. I will go back to the demo to continue testing.

 

Cheers.

[Paul]

15 minutes ago, INUMIO-Rob said:

@Paul Thanks very much for the reply. We'll label the packages with enough verbosity to avoid confusion. I'm glad to hear that this might be a solution. I will go back to the demo to continue testing.

 

Cheers.

Great! I would suggest downloading and installing the free trial if you haven't already. The demo is a little out of date, and installing the free trial will set up a private environment you can fully test. www.blesta.com for download link and install docs.

[Blesta Addons]

if i well understand your idea, a simple module can do this perfectly . so i give you a road to begin .

the module will have a rows, the rows as a levels, then every row has a culomns, every culomns has a set of user/pass entered, in a texteare , eash one in a new line , now the user order a apliance, the module will take the first user/pass , send it to the client and remove it from that database . and so ....

i code it for you if you want .

 

 

[INUMIO-Rob]

3 hours ago, naja7host said:

if i well understand your idea, a simple module can do this perfectly . so i give you a road to begin .

the module will have a rows, the rows as a levels, then every row has a culomns, every culomns has a set of user/pass entered, in a texteare , eash one in a new line , now the user order a apliance, the module will take the first user/pass , send it to the client and remove it from that database . and so ....

i code it for you if you want .

 

 

Thank you for your reply.

So I understand your idea / solution, let me repeat to you what I think you suggest:

We put the login credentials into a table in the module, and store the data in MySQL.

A customer chooses from one of three firewall types, and clicks "Order".

Blesta processes the order as usual, but also the new proposed module is listening for an event, upon which it fetches a set of credentials from MySQL, removes them from the DB, populates them in the welcome email (along with the typical new account information)?

Hopefully I am clear on the suggested specification so far. If yes, please see the following questions:

1. Would we be able to define different "pools" of credentials from which to draw? So if we have three types of appliances, we may have three "pools"?
2. Can the module inject into the customer portal somewhere a list of credentials for the customer to view?
3. Will the credentials be encrypted? How?
4. Can we add an additonal field to the username / password table for "IP / URL"?

Thank you for offering to code this. If we arrive at a suitable specification we will discuss cost?

[Blesta Addons]

1 hour ago, INUMIO-Rob said:

Thank you for your reply.

So I understand your idea / solution, let me repeat to you what I think you suggest:

We put the login credentials into a table in the module, and store the data in MySQL.

A customer chooses from one of three firewall types, and clicks "Order".

Blesta processes the order as usual, but also the new proposed module is listening for an event, upon which it fetches a set of credentials from MySQL, removes them from the DB, populates them in the welcome email (along with the typical new account information)?

Hopefully I am clear on the suggested specification so far. If yes, please see the following questions:

1. Would we be able to define different "pools" of credentials from which to draw? So if we have three types of appliances, we may have three "pools"?
2. Can the module inject into the customer portal somewhere a list of credentials for the customer to view?
3. Will the credentials be encrypted? How?
4. Can we add an additonal field to the username / password table for "IP / URL"?

Thank you for offering to code this. If we arrive at a suitable specification we will discuss cost?

Normally the module should do all the trick for you, you will not do anything manually , the only thing you will do is :

admin side :

install module , add pools , in each pools put a list of credentials .

create packages , each package for a pool , determine the price/term  .

client side ;

client select a package/pool, paid the invoice, he will receive a welcome email with the login pass .

so , th only thing you will do is updating the users/pass in the pools in blesta .nothing more

 

 

 

 

 

 

[INUMIO-Rob]

@naja7host It sounds really great. Could you possibly have a go at these other questions when you get time?

 

• Can the module inject into the customer portal somewhere a list of credentials for the customer to view?
• Will the credentials be encrypted? How?
• Can we add an additonal field to the username / password table for "IP / URL"?

Since cleartext email is not a great idea for sending permanent login credentials, it's probably best to display those credentials in the client portal somewhere lieu sending them in plaintext email. My apologies for not deciding on this before.

We need to add a field to associate the appliance IP (or URL) with the login name & pass. (three columns?)

Regards

[timnboys]

1 hour ago, INUMIO-Rob said:

@naja7host It sounds really great. Could you possibly have a go at these other questions when you get time?

 

• Can the module inject into the customer portal somewhere a list of credentials for the customer to view?
• Will the credentials be encrypted? How?
• Can we add an additonal field to the username / password table for "IP / URL"?

Since cleartext email is not a great idea for sending permanent login credentials, it's probably best to display those credentials in the client portal somewhere lieu sending them in plaintext email. My apologies for not deciding on this before.

We need to add a field to associate the appliance IP (or URL) with the login name & pass. (three columns?)

Regards

well your first point is possible since you just add a .pdt template in the module to display on clientarea for the client to view I recently read that on the blesta docs about that.

Your second point is possible too since it would be encrypted with bcrypt if I am not wrong or it could be encrypted with RSA/AES like I said not sure on the specifics of how blesta encrypts the information but yes the module would easily encrypt the information.

Your third and final point is doable as well since I did that also recently for my fraudrecord anti fraud module adding a text area field for both the blacklist & whitelist functions that was implemented inside the module after michael dance came up with that idea.

As to your encryption question on whether if it could display the information in the client area when it encrypts it on adding to the database yes it can as blesta knows its own encryption key it used to encrypt the information and will decrypt it as well as needed.

[INUMIO-Rob]

@timnboys Wonderful. Thanks very much for the details!

[Paul]

12 hours ago, timnboys said:

Your second point is possible too since it would be encrypted with bcrypt if I am not wrong or it could be encrypted with RSA/AES like I said not sure on the specifics of how blesta encrypts the information but yes the module would easily encrypt the information.

Blesta uses AES-256 for encrypting service meta data.

[Max]

18 hours ago, INUMIO-Rob said:

• Will the credentials be encrypted? How?

 

Do keep in mind that any encryption in this context is the equivalent of putting a lock on your door, but always keeping the key in.

The billing system needs to be able to decrypt it, to display it.

So if the billing system (or server it is running on) is compromised, so will the credentials be.

 

Personally, I would rather see that account passwords are not stored in the billing system at all, and there would only be a "password reset" button instead, allowing a new password to be set.

If the system would be compromised it would indeed still be possible for the intruder to reset the password, but at least that would be noticed pretty soon, as then the legitimate user would be locked out, and complain.

That might be hard to implement for your appliances though.

[INUMIO-Rob]

Excellent input, folks.

@Max Understood. I was mostly concerned with ensuring best-practices for encrypting the service data, as Paul has mentioned, and not having the credentials sitting in plaintext in a DB record.

@naja7host Should I PM you to discuss further this development?

 

Thanks everyone.

[Blesta Addons]

4 minutes ago, INUMIO-Rob said:

@naja7host Should I PM you to discuss further this development?

No problem , you can PM .