Fatal Error: Contact system adminstrator when restoring osTicket

The other day at work I was testing an upgrade of osTicket from version 1.6 to 1.9. Since I didn't want to destroy my current server if the upgrade went wrong I decided to stand up a new server side-by-side with my production osTicket server and test the upgrade there. I would just backup the current files as well as the MySQL database and restore it on the new server. What could possible go wrong?

Well after restoring the database, and the files I browsed to my new server and was greeted by a message saying:

Fatal Error: Contact system adminstrator.

I thought perhaps there was a problem with my MySQL credentials, but that wasn't it. It turned out that I needed to enable PHP short open tags in my php.ini file. In Ubuntu that file is located in /etc/php5/apache2/. All you need to do is open php.ini in your favorite text editor and change short_open_tag = Off to short_open_tag = On.

After you save your changes, just restart Apache and you should see your normal osTicket page.

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