Character encoding is always a problem when communicating between Windows and Linux. And using the "tree" command is affected by this problem if you are connected to a Linux box using Putty on a Windows box. You will certainly get weird characters, probably squares.

For those who are not sure about what tree is. It is a command-line tool to list contents of directories in a tree-like format.

A solution to this problem is to force using plain ASCII characters:

tree --charset=ASCII

You can also have an alias for this command, so that every time you type "tree", it will force tree to use the ASCII charset automatically.

alias tree='tree --charset=ASCII'

And this is an example of what you will get as an output:

/tmp
|-- claws-mail-1000
|-- keyring-x803mg
|   |-- control
|   |-- pkcs11
|   `-- ssh
|-- orbit-gdm [error opening dir]
`-- virtual-user

You installed Request Tracker 3.8 on Ubuntu 10.04 using apt-get, aptitude, or synaptic, and then you needed RT::Authen::ExternalAuth.

What you naturally did is:

sudo cpan -i RT::Authen::ExternalAuth

But you will get the following error:

prerequisite RT 0 not found

This is because you did not install request-tracker through CPAN.

An easy solution for this is to force the installation using the "-f" flag:

sudo cpan -fi RT::Authen::ExternalAuth

Introduction

In this post I will show how to create a simple approval queue in Request Tracker 3.8.

The General queue will be used as the approval queue.

Here are the different entities (groups) we will create:

• Submitters: they can submit new tickets only to the General Queue.
• Approvers: they can approve tickets (move them from the general queue to another queue)

I will also show how to add a new dashlet ("RT at a glance") containing all the tickets the user created ("My issues").

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A very good way to reduce page load time on your website is to tell your visitors' browser it can cache some specific files and save a copy on the disk.
This process is done by your web-server which is sending an Expires header and a max-age header during the HTTP response, e.g.:

Apache2 offers this feature through its mod_expires module. Note that this module is usually disabled by default, meaning your visitors would download all the files over again each time they change the page.

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