What's New in 4.2: Overview

With the upcoming release of RT 4.2, we're excited to have users get their hands on the new features we've been using internally for a few months. To highlight these features and give you some background, we'll be publishing blog posts on key features as we've done in the past.

As always, RT 4.2 will come with a full set of upgrade scripts and additional upgrade information (which you can preview here), so we hope you'll be able to upgrade soon and take advantage of the new features. If you need help upgrading from any version of RT, we also offer a range of upgrade and support services. Just send email to contact@bestpractical.com.

New RT 4.2 Features

The first thing you're likely to notice is our new theme "rudder". It's cleaner and more modern looking, and we think you'll like it. This is a shot of the home page to give you a taste of what it looks like.

The aileron theme is still available as a personal or site-wide setting.

You'll also notice that we've made some changes to the menus.

You can find a description of the changes along with our reasoning in the menus blog post.

In addition to the new theme and menu changes, RT 4.2 brings a host of other new features:

• HTML Templates for Notifications
• Ticket History Improvements
• New Charting Features
• New User Summary Page
• Grouping for Custom Fields
• Easier per Queue Scrip Configuration
• Per-user Dashboard Configuration
• SMIME Support
• Thousands of small improvements and bug fixes

We'll provide details on these and more over the next few weeks. After the release, we'll publish all of the RT 4.2 documentation in the documentation section on the Best Practical site.

End of Life Products

As previously announced, Best Practical maintains and supports two major releases of RT at a time. As such, the release of RT 4.2 will mean RT 3.8 and other related products will be scheduled for end of life. We'll provide details on products, versions, and end of life dates in an upcoming post.

Register now for Request Tracker (RT) training in New York this October

Our third training for 2013 will be held in New York, NY on October 8th and
9th. As we like to keep class sizes relatively intimate, register soon or we
may not be able to guarantee you a seat. If you can't make it to this training
session, feel free to drop us a line to suggest locations for the future.

This training will introduce you to the new features in RT 4.2 as part of a
comprehensive overview of RT. Whether you're an old hand at RT or a recent
convert, you'll have a good understanding of all of RT's features and
functionality by the end of the session.

The first day starts off with a tour of RT's web interface and continues with a
detailed exploration and explanation of RT's functionality, aimed at
non-programmer RT administrators. We'll walk through setting up a common
helpdesk configuration, from rights management, constructing workflows and
notifications, and the basics of Lifecycles.

The second day of training picks up with server-side RT administration and
dives into what you need to safely customize and extend RT. We'll cover
upgrading and deploying RT, database tuning, advanced Lifecycle configurations,
writing tools with RT's API, building an extension, and demonstrate how to
extensibly alter the web UI and internal functions.

It goes without saying that you'll get the most out of training if you attend
both days of the course, but we've designed the material so that you can step
out after the first day with a dramatically improved understanding of how to
use RT or show up on the second day and get quickly up to speed on how to make
RT do your bidding.

Each class includes training materials, a continental breakfast, and an
afternoon snack (lunch is not provided).

If you'd like to pay with Visa, MasterCard or Discover, please visit Best Practical's online store.
Unfortunately we are unable to accept American Express or PayPal. If you'd
prefer to pay with a purchase order, please email us at
training@bestpractical.com. Be sure to include:

• If you want to attend both days or a single day
• Full names and email addresses of attendees

Please also contact us at training@bestpractical.com for discounted pricing if
you are from an academic institution or if you'd like to send more than 3
people.

RT Training at Ohio LinuxFest 2013

Best Practical is happy to announce we're doing RT training this year at the Ohio LinuxFest in Columbus. Ohio LinuxFest Institute, the training portion of the conference, runs all day on Friday, September 13. We'll be presenting RT Basics in the morning and a more in-depth RT Customization class in the afternoon. Registration entitles you to one morning and one afternoon class, so you could even attend both! We'll also be around during the conference on Saturday to answer questions and talk about RT and RTIR.

RT for Incident Response 3.0.0 Released

RTIR 3.0.0 is now available.

RTIR 3.0 is fully compatible with the RT 4.0 series. It takes advantage of many new native RT features to remove complexity and ease future development.

This RTIR release requires RT 4.0.14, but we recommend installing the latest RT release available (4.0.17 at this time) as it repairs a few regressions in the upgrade path.

Please review all of the documentation in docs/UPGRADING and corresponding docs/UPGRADING-* files relevant to your current RTIR version.

You may also review the upgrading documentation at http://www.bestpractical.com/docs/rtir/3.0/

With the release of RTIR 3.0.0, the RTIR 2 series has officially entered maintenance mode. For more details about this and future RTIR release scheduling, we have published a blog post.

A permanent changelog is available.

RT 4.0.17 released

RT 4.0.17 is now available.

This release fixes an important regression in the upgrade script included in 4.0.14, 4.0.15, and 4.0.16. Attempting to upgrade from 3.x would skip key upgrade steps. New installs, and sites upgrading from within the 4.0.x series, are unaffected.

Affected installations (i.e., who upgraded from 3.x to 4.0.14, 4.0.15, or 4.0.16) should install RT 4.0.17, and then run 'make upgrade-database', specifying versions 3.9.9 through 4.0.0 as the versions to upgrade from and to. This should produce:

    Going to apply following upgrades:
* 4.0.0rc2
* 4.0.0rc4
* 4.0.0rc7

Due to the missed upgrade steps, passwords would work until after the user first logged in, or until etc/upgrade/vulnerable-passwords was run. Affected users may be found by running the following SQL query:

SELECT Name FROM Users WHERE Password LIKE '!sha512!%'
AND LENGTH(Password) = 40;

After completing the upgrade steps mentioned above, passwords for affected users should be restored from backups, the admin UI (assuming an administrator can log in), or (as a last resort) setting them explicitly via:

perl -I/opt/rt4/local/lib -I/opt/rt4/lib -MRT=-init  \
-e 'my $u = RT::User->new( RT->SystemUser );'   \
-e '($u->Load("username"))[0] or die "Failed to load user";' \
-e '$u->SetPassword("new_password");'

Adjust the username and password on the last two lines accordingly. You may need to adjust /opt/rt4/local/lib and /opt/rt4/lib on the first line if your RT is not installed into the default location of /opt/rt4

A complete changelog is available from git.

RT 4.0.16 released

RT 4.0.16 is now available.

This release fixes an important regression in the Shredder tool included in 4.0.14 and 4.0.15. Attempting to run the Shredder tool from the command line would fail with a compile-time error.

A complete changelog is available.

RT 4.0.15 Released

RT 4.0.15 is now available.

This release fixes an important regression in the ugprade scripts included in 4.0.14. If you attempted to upgrade from 3.8 with the RT FAQ Manager tables (FM_*) in your database, one of the upgrade scripts would error out.

If you were planning to upgrade from 3.8 using 4.0.14, please use 4.0.15 instead. If you have already upgraded to 4.0.14, there is no functional change in 4.0.15.

A permanent changelog is available.

RT 4.0.14 Released

I'm happy to pleased that RT 4.0.14 is now available.

This release is primarily a bugfix release. It also contains automated tests for security vulnerabilities announced earlier

A complete changelog is available.

RTIR Release Scheduling

As the next major version of RT for Incident Response (RTIR) is in final testing before release, we wanted to document our plans for the current RTIR release series.

RTIR 3.0 will join RT 4.0 as our stable series and will receive regular bugfix releases. All new development will be centered on RTIR 3.2 which will be compatible with RT 4.2 (the current RT development series).

Once RT 4.2 and RTIR 3.2 are released, we expect that RTIR 2.4 and 2.6 will follow the same end-of-life schedule as RT 3.8 and the RT FAQ Manager announced here.

At this time, RTIR 2.4 and 2.6 are only receiving security or critical bugfixes, such as these patches.

If you would like to help test the next RTIR release, the third release candidate is available.

Applying patches from rt.cpan.org tickets

Ever try to apply patches from a bug report in rt.cpan.org? Up until a few days ago, it was a bit of a pain because curl and wget didn't work without supplying your username and password. This prevented simple patch application like so:

curl -sL https://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Attachment/.../.../foo.patch \
| git am -s

As of earlier this week, that's fixed! Now you can apply patches quite easily by copying the link in RT directly to your terminal and it will just work.