Tag: Request Tracker

MantisBT vs. RT3

I’ve been praising Best Pratical’s RT3 (aka Request Tracker) for a long time.  So at my new job, given a new start, I thought that I maybe need to explore other options and widen my horizons.  After all, the needs were much less and much simpler.  We just needed a bug tracking application for three people or so and for a single project.  There was a possibility of more people joining the team later and more projects starting up, so I didn’t want to limit ourselves too much.  But immediate needs were quite simple.

After a good look around, I decided to give Mantis Bug Tracker another try.  I remember using it for a bit back when the project just started.  I even remember patching it to fit my needs back then.

During those few years that I haven’t looked at MantisBT it grew and developed quite a bit.  It is a stable, feature-rich, yet simple to manage application.  We’ve used it for the whole two month before our needs changed again and we started looking back at RT3.  Never-the-less I am glad we used it and got experience with another tool.  I got a few ideas out of it, which I will be implementing in our new RT3 installation.  Below are the few things that I loved and hated about the MantisBT.  Maybe you’ll find them useful.

Continue reading MantisBT vs. RT3

Fixing advanced search performance in RT3

It’s been bugging me for a while now that advanced search is extremely slow in our RT3.  I thought it was something related to the famous Perl bug, but apparently it wasn’t.  Then I was I waiting for Fedora 10 to come out, so that we’d upgrade our RT3 installation to version 3.8.  And that didn’t solve the problem either.  Finally, we got bored and annoyed enough by this problem to actually do soemthing about it.  The solution was, as often, just a Google search away.  Here is the quote from this discussion:

Faulty rights on a specific queue caused the owner list to be quite long, which RT didn’t like. (By mistake someone had given the own ticket right on the queue to all unprivileged users)

I went through all the queues to check the rights, and there it was – a test queue had “Own Ticket” assigned to “Everyone”.  Immediately, after remove this access levels things got back to normal.

Fixing RT3 on Fedora 10

We upgraded our development server to Fedora 10 over the weekend.  Among other things, it runs RT3 – excellent support, issue management, and bug tracking tool.  Once the upgrade was over, we ended up with a semi-working setup of RT3.  The emails were going through just fine, but the web interface was giving out a blank screen with no content or errors or warnings.

Googled a bit, but that didn’t help a lot.   Went through server logs and found an out of memory shout from Storable.pm:

2325:Callback called exit at 
../../lib/Storable.pm (autosplit into ../../lib/auto/Storable/thaw.al) 
line 415.

Googled for that, but it turned out that quite a few people have the problem with this module running out of memory.  And not only in RT3.

So I left it where it was and had some good night sleep.  And it helped.  In the morning, englightment came in, and I tried reloading the page with cookies and cache cleaned.  It worked.  And then it didn’t work again.  Cleaning cookies was helping for a couple of page views.  So I dived back into the RT_Config.pm file to see my options.  There it was.

=item C<$WebSessionClass>
C<$WebSessionClass> is the class you wish to use for managing Sessions.
It defaults to use your SQL database, but if you are using MySQL 3.x and
plans to use non-ascii Queue names, uncomment and add this line to
F<RT_SiteConfig.pm> will prevent session corruption.
=cut
# Set($WebSessionClass , 'Apache::Session::File');

Once I enabled Apache::Session::File, the problem went away.  We are now back to work, enjoying the new web 2.0 round corners interface, pastel colors, and more.

Toolbox : WordPress, CakePHP, SugarCRM, RT

Over the last couple of years I’ve been working a lot with these four applications – WordPress, CakePHP, SugarCRM, and RT.  Each of these is beautiful in its own way.  Each of these tools is an Open Source Software. Each of these tools has a large community. Each of these tools has a free and commercial support and development. Each of these can be used in a number of ways to solve a whole range of problems.  Let me briefly introduce each one of them.

Continue reading Toolbox : WordPress, CakePHP, SugarCRM, RT

Annoying software

Slashdot is running the post about annoying software.  The fact that Slashdot crowd mostly consists of computer geeks is sort of a guarantee for some interesting comments.

With my Fedora 9 saga I had to review and try a lot of new software.  Needless to say, I found quite a few annoying bits.  Here is a brief list, just to give you an idea:

  • Clock applet in Gnome. It shows calendar with Sunday being first day of the week.  If you don’t like it, you’ll have to recompile your locale to change it. This one is cancelled out though by an excellent support of Google Calendar (or, for that matter, any other web published calendar).
  • Metacity window manager in Gnome. Window titles are displayed in the middle.  This is really annoying for those of us who are used to seeing them on the left.  There is no option to change this setting either in GUI or in GConf.
  • Pidgin new message notification. I once had it popping up nice looking bubbles, but I don’t remember how I managed to do it.  I also don’t remember how I managed to break it.  And I have no idea to bring them back.  I really miss them though.
  • WordPress 2.5 post editing screen. It has been much reworked in the latest version and looks and feels so much better. However, the list of categories was moved from a really convenient location on the right of the screen to a really inconvenient location at the bottom of the screen.
  • FileZilla FTP manager. This one drives me nuts with server connections.  It either disconnects every 40 seconds when being idle.  Or it keeps multiple connections open forever and most FTP servers block me out temporary.
  • Request Tracker (RT3). Works perfectly with queues and tickets, but annoys the heck out of me when I need to do something with users.  Users aren’t first level citizens, like tickets.
  • SugarCRM. Excellent business tool, with lots of small annoyances, like not being able to set default user role, disable theme selector everywhere, change logos to company ones, lock down the functionality, etc.  Most of these are easily fixable.  But some aren’t as trivial as they may sound or seem.
  • Google Reader. This one annoys me a bit (but often) when I want to leave a few items in the feed unread and go deeper into archives.  Somehow it keeps marking everything I passed as read.

Now, what piece of software were you annoyed with recently?