Keywords / Forwarding / Control / LDAP

RT Users
1

I’ve implemented rt 1.0.7 for a couple of units within the university, and
it’s performing well.

We’re in the process of thinking about rt 2, and I have a few questions:

  1. Can anyone explain what the purpose of keywords is?

  2. The information office receives hundreds of emails a week, and many of
    them must be forwarded onto the people responsible (who don’t use RT). How
    difficult would it be to have a ‘forward’ button which would present a
    drop-down list of addresses, fwd the ticket on, and mark it as resolved?

Perl doesn’t scare me, but I’d rather ask here first in case someone’s
already done it. Any hints as to where would be the appropriate place to
put this code would also be appreciated.

  1. As I mentioned, Several departments use RT, and at the moment I have
    several seperate instances of RT installed. I’d much prefer to maintain
    one single database, and still be able to delegate user account control to
    the appropriate supervisors in the departments concerned, without them
    being able to mess with the other queue’s settings. Is this even remotely
    possible?

  2. We already have the entire university in an LDAP system - Has anyone
    written something to provide LDAP authentication to RT (and/or importing
    name,email etc from LDAP). Jesse said a long time ago that RT2 would be a
    lot easier to add authentication methods to - if I code it myself, where
    should I be looking ?

Thanks in advance.

T�o de Hesselle, | Diplomacy is about surviving until
Unix Systems Administrator | the next century. Politics is
| about surviving until Friday
University of Technology, Sydney | afternoon. – Yes, Minister

2

I’ve implemented rt 1.0.7 for a couple of units within the university, and
it’s performing well.

We’re in the process of thinking about rt 2, and I have a few questions:

  1. Can anyone explain what the purpose of keywords is?

Imagine if you could define multiple area pulldowns per queue, optionally be
able to select multiple values for some areas and could define areas
that apply to all queues. That’s Keywords.

  1. The information office receives hundreds of emails a week, and many of
    them must be forwarded onto the people responsible (who don’t use RT). How
    difficult would it be to have a ‘forward’ button which would present a
    drop-down list of addresses, fwd the ticket on, and mark it as resolved?

Perl doesn’t scare me, but I’d rather ask here first in case someone’s
already done it. Any hints as to where would be the appropriate place to
put this code would also be appreciated.

It shouldn’t be that hard to do, but I’ve not heard of anyone doing it
so far. You’d actually probably want to be doing this directly
to the web front end. Take a look at webrt/Ticket/Display.html and
the components it calls.

  1. As I mentioned, Several departments use RT, and at the moment I have
    several seperate instances of RT installed. I’d much prefer to maintain
    one single database, and still be able to delegate user account control to
    the appropriate supervisors in the departments concerned, without them
    being able to mess with the other queue’s settings. Is this even remotely
    possible?

The access control system is pretty flexible, but I’d need to know waht you mean by ‘user account control’ before I could give you a reasonable answer.

  1. We already have the entire university in an LDAP system - Has anyone
    written something to provide LDAP authentication to RT (and/or importing
    name,email etc from LDAP). Jesse said a long time ago that RT2 would be a
    lot easier to add authentication methods to - if I code it myself, where
    should I be looking ?

Well, I haven’t touched the importer, but for authentication, you might
want to look over the last week or two’s list archives at http://lists.fsck.com
People have been dealing with setting up ‘External Authentication’ which
would mean that you’d have to set up mod_ldap and then you’d bascially be
done :wink:

Thanks in advance.

–
Téo de Hesselle, | Diplomacy is about surviving until
Unix Systems Administrator | the next century. Politics is
| about surviving until Friday
University of Technology, Sydney | afternoon. – Yes, Minister

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jesse reed vincent – root@eruditorum.org – jesse@fsck.com
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easy as herding cats…" – Andy Tanenbaum on the linux development model, 1992

3
  1. We already have the entire university in an LDAP system -
    Has anyone
    written something to provide LDAP authentication to RT
    (and/or importing
    name,email etc from LDAP). Jesse said a long time ago that
    RT2 would be a
    lot easier to add authentication methods to - if I code it
    myself, where
    should I be looking ?

I’ve already implemented LDAP with RT2. I’m still considering the
synchronization issues between incoming requests and what the requestor’s
LDAP userid (or any attribute, really) would be. I would bet that within
two week’s I’ll submit a patch that cleanly handles insertion of
site-specific code for this problem with at least the one example I end up
using personally.

Try using Apache::AuthenLDAP and Apache::AuthzLDAP. I’ve written both of
these modules and have had great success with them within IBM. Also, you
might want to wrap Apache::AuthenCache and Apache::AuthzCache around them
for improved performance.

Regards,
Christian

Christian Gilmore
Infrastructure & Tools Team Lead
Web & Multimedia Development
IBM Software Group

4

Hi Christian,

On Mon, 02 Jul 2001, Christian Gilmore sent incredible lines:
[…]

I’ve already implemented LDAP with RT2. I’m still considering the
synchronization issues between incoming requests and what the requestor’s
LDAP userid (or any attribute, really) would be. I would bet that within
two week’s I’ll submit a patch that cleanly handles insertion of
site-specific code for this problem with at least the one example I end up
using personally.
Try using Apache::AuthenLDAP and Apache::AuthzLDAP. I’ve written both of
these modules and have had great success with them within IBM. Also, you
might want to wrap Apache::AuthenCache and Apache::AuthzCache around them
for improved performance.

Do you have a quick guide how you perform this? I think LDAP is a
quite nice and important thing that could happend to RT.

… may the Tux be with you! =Thomas=
Thomas Bendler \:// ml@bendler-net.de
Billwiese 22 (o -) http://www.bendler-net.de/
21033 Hamburg —ooO-(_)-Ooo— tel.: 0 177 - 277 37 61
Germany Linux, enjoy the ride …!