[lug] RT?

[Nate Duehr]

Matt James wrote:
> LUGies,
> 
> Does anyone on this list use RT (Request Tracker) by Best Practical?  I'm
> looking at possibly implementing this system at my new job which does not
> currently use any type of issue tracking system.  What a headache. I'd like
> to know the pros and cons of this system and maybe some pointers on how to
> get started with it.  The online documentation WIKI looks broken to me so
> I'm turning to this group for some guidance.  

Yes, been using it for a few years now.  If you're a Debian-head, it's 
packaged in Debian, making all the massive Perl dependencies a lot simpler.

Once that part's done, setting up MySQL with the tables, building your 
groups, and deciding if you want web access, etc.

Then you play around with it a bit before announcing it to the world.

If you set up web access for the "general public" you have to add in 
some code from the wiki to generate "random" usernames and passwords for 
people that the system can mail back to them...

If you're only planning on using it internally, you'll probably want to 
tie it to whatever centralized authentication system you're using if you 
have a lot of users.

Since I'm running a system for "the general public", I couldn't do that 
last one... so never looked into it...

My only regret is that we really liked it because it has an e-mail 
interface... but... with spam levels as high as they are these days, you 
really have to filter very heavily the addresses being used to feed it 
if it's going to have external e-mail access.  Our ticket DB gets about 
ten spam messages into it a week after massive filters.  Someone has to 
click on them and close/cancel them.

It's almost impossible to explain how I set it up... I loaded it, 
pointed a couple of e-mail addresses at it (one for replies to tickets, 
one for "comments" only seen by the people working on the tickets).

And I edited the templates pretty heavily to explain the process to 
whomever sent it an e-mail.  If you want to try out what it looks like 
to the outside world via e-mail or web sometime, I can let you log into 
our system or send it a "fake" ticket I'll just tell the volunteer group 
to ignore.

Mostly I just experimented with it until I got it doing what I wanted.

Nate