RT 3.8 reaches End-of-Life

As previously announced, the 3.8 series of RT has now reachedend-of-life, and is no longer supported by Best Practical. This also ends support for RTFM, as well as RTIR 2.4 and 2.6, as those products depended on RT 3.8.

Best Practical continues to support the RT 4.0 (maintenance) series, as well as RT 4.2 (stable). RTFM was integrated into RT 4.0 as Articles, and is thus forward-compatible. RTIR 3.0 is available for RT 4.0, and we expect release candidates for RTIR 3.2 (compatible with RT 4.2) to be available shortly.

If you are currently still running RT 3.8 (or earlier!) and would like help with your upgrade, you can get in touch with us at sales@bestpractical.com for professional assistance.

RT for Incident Response 3.0.1 Released

RTIR 3.0.1 contains a number of bug fixes identified since 3.0.0 as well asperformance improvements for those upgrading from RTIR 2.

Read complete Release Notes and Download RTIR 3.0.1.

Join us for our Q2 Request Tracker training in Dallas!

Hello! Best Practical is pleased to announce our second Request Tracker training for 2014! We will be in Dallas, Texas on May 20-21. We do have a limit on how many people we can effectively teach, so please register as soon as you can to make sure you get a seat. If you can't make Dallas, we will have upcoming sessions later this year in Boston, MA and Los Angeles, CA. Please let us know if you have a suggestion for a future location by dropping us a line at training@bestpractical.com!

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.

For both days, the cost is USD $1,495. A single day is USD $995. Each class includes training materials, a continental breakfast, and snacks (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 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.

Thanks for your support of Request Tracker!

Don't miss Best Practical's first Request Tracker training of 2014 in London!

Just a reminder that Best Practical's first RT training is taking place on March 19-20 in London, UK. This will likely be our only non-US public session this year. This training will introduce you to the new features in RT 4.2 as part of a comprehensive overview of RT. Whether you've been using Request Tracker for years or are a recent convert, you'll have a good understanding of all of RT's features and functionality by the end of the session.

For both days, it is USD $1,495 for one person. This includes training materials, continental style breakfast, and snacks. You can register by heading over to our shop to pay via credit card (Amex not accepted, unfortunately.) You can also drop us a note at training@bestpractical.com if you'd rather we send an invoice. Finally, if you're from an academic institution, or would like to send more than 3 people, let us know so we can give you a bit of a discount. We're always happy to answer any questions, so please don't be shy.

Assets 1.0 released

We are very happy to announce the first version ofRT::Extension::Assets, an asset tracking extension for RT 4.2.1 and above. The extension leverages RT's custom field architecture, making it a very flexible platform for tracking whatever type of asset data you need to record. It also comes with some roles and rights to allow you to assign assets and manage access permissions. For more information, give the tutorial a read.

RT 4.2.3 released

We are chuffed to announce that RT 4.2.3 is now available. This release is primarily a bugfix release; a complete list of changes is available from the release notes.

Assets, release candidate 2

After feedback from users, and a couple minor bugfixes found in the first release candidate, we're happy to announce the second release candidate of our Assets extension. Barring any further complications, we expect an official release next week.

RT public training in London

Our first training for 2014 will take place in London, England on March 19-20.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 London, we will have upcoming trainings this year in Dallas, Texas and Boston, Massachusetts. Please let us know at training@bestpractical.com if you're interested in these other trainings, or if you have a suggestion for where we should hold one.

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.

For both days, the cost is USD $1,495. Single days are USD $995. Each class includes training materials, a continental breakfast, and snacks (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 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.

Release candidate of Assets for RT

Best Practical is very happy to announce the first release candidate of RT::Extension::Assets, an asset tracking extension for RT. The extension leverages RT's custom field architecture, making it a very flexible platform for tracking whatever type of asset data you need to record. It also comes with some roles and rights to allow you to assign assets and manage access permissions.

As you might expect, the extension integrates with RT to allow you to easily link RT tickets to the assets they refer to. Is a user submitting a ticket for a laptop problem? Go to the user's User Summary page, find the laptop assigned to them, and create a ticket. Now you can see all the information you need about the laptop while troubleshooting the issue.

Tracking a service request for a server with a vendor? Locate the server to find out if it's still under warranty and find the details to provide to support. Then you can open a ticket in RT to track the service request from your side.

To help make it easier to try things out, we've put together a simple tutorial that walks through a few use cases. This should get you something up and running quickly so you can experiment. We've included a few custom fields with the tutorial to demonstrate how it might work. You can then add on as many as you need to track your asset data.

If you decide it's a good fit, we've built a CSV importer as a general purpose helper to pull in data from other systems. Whether you're tracking things in a spreadsheet or can export from some other tool, it's a quick way to get your data into RT.

We'd like to acknowledge Reed College, who collaborated with us on this extension and funded the development. They are currently running the extension in their production environment, so they were not only the major contributor, but they are also the currently the primary testers.

And that's where you come in. This is the first RC and we'd like to get to an official release as soon as possible. If you've been eagerly waiting for this extension or are pleasantly surprised to learn about it, we need you to try it out and let us know if you run into any issues. Note that it requires RT 4.2.1 or later to run. We know you'll likely have feature requests as you start to use it, but right now we'd like to focus on bugs and issues. You can report them at assets-bugs@bestpractical.com or even send pull requests via github.

Security vulnerability in RT 4.2

Versions of RT between 4.2.0 and 4.2.2 (inclusive) are vulnerable to adenial-of-service attack via the email gateway; any installation which accepts mail from untrusted sources is vulnerable, regardless of the permissions configuration inside RT. This vulnerability is assigned CVE-2014-1474.

This vulnerability is caused by poor parsing performance in the Email::Address::List module, which RT depends on. We recommend that affected users upgrade their version of Email::Address::List to v0.02 or above, which resolves the issue.

After extracting the contents, the module can be installed by running:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make install

The first step should be sure to use the same perl that RT runs using. If you are unsure, the first line of /opt/rt4/sbin/standalone_httpd should contain the full path to the relevant perl binary. The last step will likely need to be run with root permissions. After this process, you should restart your webserver.

If you need help resolving this issue locally, we will provide discounted pricing for single-incident support; please contact us at sales@bestpractical.com for more information.