[CLUE-Tech] Trouble Ticket System

[Lynn Danielson]

Stephen Smith wrote:
> 
> Can someone out there please recommend a Linux
> based trouble ticket / helpdesk system..?

My company has been using Keystone <http://keystone.whitepj.net/>
for a couple of years.  It seems to be meeting our needs pretty
well.  It's a web based ticket tracking system based on MySQL and
php3.  It will email the tech and contacts specified on the ticket
and send out automatic reminders if tickets remains open.  It can
be configured so that simply replying to a keystone email will post
a follow up to the ticket (a feature I like quite a bit).  It is an
open source commercial project.  It can be downloaded for free but
it is no longer being developed.

I've been told that on slow machines it can take an unacceptable
amount of time for the browser to interperet the html for a large
list of tickets.  Apparently because of the number of frames and
tables involved.  Filters can be set up to minimize the number of
tickets you view and this can help a lot with that problem.  My
default filter shows me only my open tickets and it's never taken
more than a second or two to display them on my machine.

Another small annoyance has been with the backslash characters
being "escaped".  Backslashes will show up fine in the emails, but
in the keystone tickets they dissapear.  If you use two backslashes
(\\) it will show up as one in the keystone ticket, but as two in
the email.  So, if you discuss network share using UNC, i.e.,
\\hostname\sharename, it will show up as \hostnamesharename in the
ticket.  I switched to using forward slashes, because that used to
work just fine with Windows, but it doesn't with newer versions.
It's possible that turning off magic quotes in php might fix this
problem, but I don't know for sure.

A coworker of mine who installed keystone for us is currently
looking for an alternative.  He's looked at bugtraq (sp?) and
doublechocolatte (sp?) and seems to think that they could be
modified to use as a general purpose ticketing system, but
they're designed more for software development.

Hope this helps,

Lynn