ServiceNow – adding currency & country conversions

This week we were tasked with including another country’s currency in to our Procurement system within ServiceNow, with the added desire to convert the currency automatically. It wasn’t too crazy, but every community post I saw mentioned the “Country Code” aspect of it as if it were enabled by default. And I wasn’t able to find a specific guide about how to do it. To remind myself in the future:

Define your instances country for default currency. It’s implied but not defined at least in the instance we have access to. That can be done in the Locale Code section of System Localization. They are two letter language . two letter country code. Here is the list of acceptable options.

Then we had to add the Country to the User form. That was just as simple as modifying the form layout to include it. Afterward, adding the country, by name, including the three letter country code to the Choice List.

And finally, including the currency if it doesn’t exist already. Like the country we added we were surprised it didn’t already exist. But adding it as a currency and having our procurement form include the option led to the type of behavior we wanted: depending on the users country, all currency on the instance is converted automatically, behind the scenes.

Hosting a website with LAMP on Debian 10

Many people have asked me over the years for assistance setting up a website. I’m no expert in hosting one, and until now never took the time to learn. It took my girlfriend asking for help to make me seriously consider assisting instead of pointing to a company that specializes in web hosting. Only time will tell if we made the right decision in self-managing our own domains and servers. At least I will have learned a lot by the end of this journey, whenever that may be.

Since I already had a VPS (Virtual Private Server) that I use daily, and some experience with Linux administration I can thank a previous employer for allowing me to learn with, I was able to extrapolate and iterate on those past experiences. I definitely wanted to tackle it using open-source tools, and it only took a tiny bit of effort to get started thanks to the guides offered by Digital Ocean and Linode.

For Linux, I prefer Debian because I’m familiar with it and it’s one of the most widely known distributions of Linux available. I needed to need to install a set of packages on Linux, called Apache, MySQL (Maria db), and PHP2. This is a guide I wrote afterward, and I hope to be able to follow it to success again in the future.

Initializing…

NeuroticApe… I sure am. My intention for this blog is to satisfy my own edification and posterity: to keep a record of problems I run into as a general IT professional or that friends, family and life throw at me.

Perhaps now I can stop fooling myself into thinking that I’ll actually remember how I set up some esoteric or ancient software. Like that one time, 5 months ago in the middle of a hectic day…. only time will tell.

Oh, and digression is on the agenda as well. And pie. Lots of pie. You do know that the cake is a lie?