[Rtir] Some questions, some comments...

[Jorn Hass]

First off, my hat off to Jesse (& Co) for working and providing
RT/RTIR/RTFM. That takes some doing.

My comments and question are not based on problems that I experience, as
I have managed to get all components installed and running, as they
should be. (Or at least I believe they should be... :)


RTIR is installed as a "local" add-on. Why was this done, and is there
any plans to add it into the actual RT tree? The problem with the local
tree is that I end up having to edit the installed files, rather than
the local copies of it. Not a train-smash, just a thought...


I have been looking at RT in general for an Abuse queue. However, there
are some serious implications... Using RTIR has some issues as well.

I.E. I would like to take an abuse complaint, and have a link, with
which I can launch an investigation, which automatically creates the new
ticket, links the old one, and copies the text of the old one into the
Content field, to be edited, so that we effectively have "attached" the
complaint that gets sent to our client for actioning.
If the client does not get the original message, they claim that there
was no complaint...

One big catch in this whole scenario is that we are legally not allowed
to disclose our client's info to a complainant, unless required to do so
by a court of law, so the complainant should never see the contact email
and conversation between ourselves and the client, unless our client
chooses to disclose this.

I therefore have considered, to run an incoming queue, and an "outgoing"
queue, where we generate tickets in our clients' name, and any
conversation will be delegated to that ticket only. The original
complaint is then marked as being dependant on this "conversation"
ticket.

In order to try and streamline this, I am playing with the old
Stock-Answers. Yes, I know everybody says that RTFM does the job, but I
disagree with that. Our website is not visible from outside, so linking
RTFM articles with a URL to it, is useless, as they cannot see it.
Unless my RTFM doesn't work the way it's supposed to...
Therefore, I managed to get StockAnswers to work on RT3.0.6, and was
wondering what the general feel is towards using something similar in
RTIR, to have stock-"fill-in"-templates, to send to the client that is
being complained about...

We do not use the Tools section of RTIR, as we have IP allocations of
our own, and we do not have much need for traceroute or global whois
lookups. Our setup is of such nature that we receive complaints about
our clients, but we do not receive complaints from our clients, about
outside abuse, as we do not have the manpower to actually man such an
abuse setup.
I would therefore possibly like to run a local whois server, with
contact details for our specific needs.
Has anyone got any experience in setting up a whois server with local
content, and if so, where do I start looking for source and docs etc.?

System:
FreeBSD 4.8 Stable
Apache 1.3.27
Mod Perl 1.27
Perl 5.8.0
RT 3.0.6
RTIR 1.0.0
RTFM 2.0.0

Regards, Jörn Hass
Senior Systems Engineer, Infrastructure.
Internet Solutions
Tel:		+27 (11) 575 1000
Fax:		+27 (11) 388 3362
E-mail:		jorn.hass at is.co.za
WWW:		http://www.is.co.za


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