first impression of Bestpractical's RT, an open source ticketing system

I heard quite a bit of good things about RT, an open source ticketing system.  Here is the first impression I had after retrieving the source tarball off bestpractical.com's web site.

The current stable version is 3.6.1.

Per README in the source tarball,

• "RT is an enterprise-grade issue tracking system. It allows organizations to keep track of what needs to get done, who is working on which tasks, what's already been done, and when tasks were (or weren't) completed."
• GPLv2
• commercial support is available including training and such: sales@bestpractical.com .
  

The installation seems a little too involving, even for a professional UNIX/linux system engineer.

• it requires Perl >5.8.3 with a lot of CPAN modules. To the developer's credit, a RT util tool is built to help get CPAN modules and compile them in place.
  
• It support a few RDBMS as its backend: MySQL/Postgres/Oracle/SQLite
• Apache with mod_perl (or FastCGI)

linttylog hang my Linux system on a Dell PowerEdge 6850 at first run

When troubleshooting a Dell PowerEdge 6850 server, I read on Dell's linux-poweredge mailing list that a small utility named linttylog may be useful to dump log from the PERC raid controller.  The function sounded a lot like what action=exportlog does using OMSA's srvadmin services. However, I was desperate enough to try anything reportedly working. So, without much ado, I downloaded the utility. It came in as an RPM and was a bit aged (probably out-of-date too).

syb04:/# rpm -ivh linttylog-1.00-0.i386.rpm
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
   1:linttylog              ########################################### [100%]

syb04:/# linttylog


        Serial Port Output History Handling Application 1.00 (Date 10/01/2003)
                Copyright (c) 2003 LSI Logic Corp.

Depending on the buffer size, it may take several minutes...Please wait...

        TTY History Updated in the file tty.log.

Exiting.
syb04:/# ls -ltr
====================================
The ssh shell session got disconnected from here. I couldn't log back in either. No response on serial console either. Nothing on the console screen. Nothing logged onto the remote syslogd server either, even though all kernel.* and all *.warn are redirected via /etc/syslogd.conf and verified to be working.

I had to power cycle the server to get it back online again. Once the server was back, I re-ran the utility successfully without any problem. What the ... The moral of this post is not to run linttylog on your mission critical system in production.