[rt-users] Using RT to track system changes..

[Dustin Puryear]

At 01:30 PM 11/3/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>At 11:24 PM 11/2/2002 -0600, Dustin Puryear wrote:
>>We are looking at RT for use in both tracking client and internal 
>>technical issues as well as tracking changes that we make to systems. The 
>>first use is obviously what RT was designed to do. As for tracking system 
>>changes, that is another matter altogether. Essentially, we would like to 
>>have a standardized system whereby when we make a change to a server, be 
>>it UNIX or Windows, we can either send an email or submit a change entry 
>>via the web to a database. I'm thinking that we can RT for just this.
>
>Hi Dustin,
>
>This is what we do at Lumeta:
>
>My mentor and co-worker, Tom Limoncelli, set up our systems to use 
>Makefiles a lot. So we make changes to files like named.conf-master and 
>dhcpd.conf and such, and do a make which then (if necessary) builds the 
>actual live conf files or such, and checks things into RCS. I don't see 
>why you couldn't do things like send an email to an RT queue with a copy 
>of the file you just edited, or even something more advanced by tagging 
>along the "diff" version of the RCS checked-in code, or what-have-you.... 
>We run FreeBSD, so RCS is built-in--nothing says that CVS wouldnt' work! :)

Glenn, we do indeed use RCS quite a bit already on the UNIX systems that we 
manage. However, you forget that we mentioned more than UNIX systems, so 
this style of managing configuration changes can only be applied to some of 
the systems we manage. (Unless RCS now works with the Windows Registry? :) 
We wanted a system that works with everything, so we decided to see what RT 
could do for us. We will continue to use RCS on UNIX systems, and have in 
fact considered sending rcsdiff output to RT whenever a change is made with 
comments.

Thanks for the quick reply!

Regards, Dustin


---
Dustin Puryear <dustin at puryear-it.com>
Puryear Information Technology
Windows, UNIX, and IT Consulting
http://www.puryear-it.com