Linux System Administration Recipes A Problem-Solution Approach

CHAPTER 12 ■ MANAGING TIME AND PEOPLE■ Note You can add custom fields to a ticket if there’s information that you want to encourage people to provide(for example, the name of the machine they’re working on). Create these via Configuration Custom Fields New Custom Field. You can set various validation options or make the field mandatory. Add this field to a particularqueue via the Applies To option on the custom field configuration page or by selecting a queue from theConfiguration Queues menu and then adding the field via the Ticket Custom Fields option. To set a custom fieldto apply globally, use the Global menu. You can also add custom fields to users or groups if that’s helpful in yourenvironment.RT uses queues to organize tickets, and each ticket belongs to a queue. By default there’s just asingle default queue. To add more than one queue (for example, to enable yourself to separate softwarefrom hardware problems, or bugs as opposed to requests), go to Configuration Queues New Queue.Fill in as many of the boxes as you like, and click Save Changes. Bear in mind that once you have createda queue, you can’t delete it without editing the database directly. You can, however, disable it (bydeselecting the “Enable queue” box), which means that it won’t be visible on the site.To edit the queue configuration, select the queue in the Configuration Queues menu. This allowsyou to do things such as setting a per-queue reply and comment address, which may be useful especiallyif you’re working in a multisysadmin environment (since you might want different admins to beresponsible for different queues). You’ll definitely want to set up the AdminCc group for each queue,which defines the people who are watching the queue. You do this from the Watchers page for thequeue. The AdminCc group is a preexisting group whose membership is user-defined. This group, oncedefined, will be contacted in certain circumstances. By default, they’ll be contacted when a ticket iscreated and when any activity happens on it. You can also add any other user to watch a queue or aticket, which means that they will be e-mailed in the event of any relevant activity.■ Note The best way to do this is to first set up a group using the Configuration Groups New Group menuitem. All you need to fill in is the name and description; then click Save Changes to create the group. Then you canadd members to the group using the Configuration Groups Select Groups menu item and then the Membersmenu item (in the left menu pane) in each group’s configuration page. You’ll be given two lists, one with currentmembers and check boxes for deletion and one with all other users, from which you can select the user(s) to add.This means that you can set up a “queue watching” group with a given membership and set up each queue suchthat it’s watched by this group. Then if someone leaves the organization or gets different responsibilities, you onlyhave to move them from the group rather than editing each queue individually.237Download at WoweBook.Com