[rt-users] html is request subjects breaking webrt.cgi, and a queestion

[Darren Nickerson]

Hiya. I've been dealing with the strangest problem I've ever seen, and so I 
figured since I finally cracked it, I need to share the story with someone ;-)

So I'm migrating from ReqNG to RT . . . I install RT, put req2rt to work 
feeding req tickets into RT, and go for coffee. Good thing too - took ages. 
Actually, it never completed, halfway through the loading of resolved tickets 
it finally exhausted my machine's available memory. But that's another story!

So I setup a new apache, virtually hosting support.tpc.int and cgi.tpc.int, 
both setup to deal with VERY different tasks. For the first time, I also setup 
the WWW interface to RT, webrt.cgi.

GREAT!

So I decide to try it out . . . the admin interface works fine, and for the 
most part so too does the frames version of webrt.cgi. Only when I press the 
button to "UPDATE QUEUE FILTERS" it sends me off to a shocking URL - 
http://cgi.tpc.int/cgi-bin/tpcfax.pl.  WHAT?????? *boggle*

So I'm flummoxed. That script does exist on the other vhost, and I'd been 
playing with it today, so I spent a lot of time looking for a mistaken edit, 
or misconfig which might have included this URL in the RT stuff. I also spent 
a long time learning how webrt.cgi works . . .all to no avail.

I ended up dumping the source of the page webrt was giving me, and initially
the construction of the form looked fine, and should have sent me to the webrt
script again, not tpcfax.pl.

SOLUTION? One of my tickets looks like this:

[root at hewes sniffit-0.3.7.beta]# rt -show 6403
Welcome to Request Tracker 1.0.2
        Serial Number:6403
               Queue:TPC.INT Support
                Area:
          Requestors:rayhan at pimail.com.pk
               Owner: 
             Subject:[TPC Support #6403] Re: May  I Use   <form action="http://cgi.tpc.int/cgi-bin/tpcfax.pl"  ?
      Final Priority:50
    Current Priority:50
              Status:open
             Created:Fri Dec  3 21:51:04 1999
   Last User Contact:Sun May  7 15:10:57 2000
        Last Contact:6 day
                 Due:Wed Dec 31 19:00:00 1969
                 Age:5 mth

That subject line is the culprit. It changed/redirected the entire action of
the form. DOH!!!!

Finally, a question . . . as you can see our queue is very backlogged . . . as 
a consequence there are about 7000 open tickets. Is there any way to tell the 
web interface to only display the last 100 requests? Without such a feature 
the entire WWW interface is ridiculously slow and resource-intensive.

Thanks for any info!

-Darren