Fun with OTRS: Generic Agent

We use OTRS in a professional capacity, and over time, the database of tickets has gotten rather unruly.

To reduce this, we'd have to a) corral "junk" tickets better, and b) remove them from the database more permanently.

Both can be achieved with the "Generic Agent" in OTRS. As a test, I was hunting for bounce-back notices that were older than 30 days so they could be moved to a spam queue and safely deleted there.


To delete tickets permanently, the solution was easily found; under "Execute Ticket Commands" in the Generic Agent, "Delete Tickets" can be enabled, which will drop all affected tickets from the database.

For safety's sake, I configured a Generic Agent that only targeted tickets in the spam queue older than 30 days.


Targeting the correct tickets was a little harder, and searching on google yielded no swift results as apparently I was the only person who would dare try to do such a thing.

I could find tickets older than 30 days if they had a specific subject line, producing either ~1700 or ~5200 results for either subject I was targeting, but when I tried to target multiple subject lines, there was somehow 0 results.

When working with PostMaster filters, something like the following is tolerated to target multiple subject lines:

(subjecta)|(alternatesubject)

However, as we're working with emails that have since arrived, PostMaster Filters cannot be used. Generic Agent has to be used, and the above is not effective when used as "Select Tickets" criteria.

I found a post that said the | (or) operator was accepted, but as I discovered, what it did not mention is that the Generic Agent requires it to be used twice:

"subjecta"||"alternatesubject"

This correctly detects tickets with a subject matching either of the quoted texts. It does not, however, catch variations on either of the subjects, e.g. "subjectb"

This is more easily solved; wildcards can be used:

"subject*"||"alternatesubject"

This then correctly detects failure notifications with subjects starting with "subject", e.g. "subjecta" or "subjectb", or exactly matching "alternatesubject".


Obviously these are examples, but documenting it in the hope that it helps anyone who has to wrestle with OTRS in the future.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Atom editor: Hide project tab / tree view

 Atom does not have an option for doing this by default, and I'm not the only one who wanted to change it. From https://discuss.atom.io/t/hide-treeview-by-default/7718/46, Jake posted the most functional way to correct this behavior. To change this: 1) Go to File -> Init script... 2) Paste: atom.workspace.onDidOpen ({item}) -> itemName = item.constructor.name if (itemName != 'TreeView') # no action if open TreeView intentionally dock = atom.workspace.paneContainerForURI('atom://tree-view') if dock && dock.isVisible() dock.hide() 3) Save On next startup, the project tab will be hidden. Works at this time of posting.
Read more

Removing the watermark from LIV

So, if you're reading this, you've been trying to make use of LIV, the mixed reality app. It's rather neat -- creates a virtual camera so you can see an avatar in a VR game like Beat Saber, or so that you can green screen yourself into it. What isn't rather neat, however, is the fact that the program watermarks the fuck out of the output -- do they expect you to buy it? No, the program is free, they insist, and they don't want money unless you're a commercial user, which is fair and fine, since I'm not a commercial user. But if they don't want me to pay for it, then what do  they want, aside from pissing me off? According to them, the "official" way to get the watermark removed is to join a Discord  and go to a channel. Discord is nice, but I don't use it religiously, and I'm certainly not inclined to be forced to join a community just to pump numbers, and if your validation system requires third party services... well, I've
Read more

Videos not working in Irfanview

 I love Irfanview. It's great, I use it as my picture browser and quick-edits tool. I use it to browse through folders which might contain MP4 or Webm videos, as a substitute for gifs. However, for the longest time, and on repeat occasions, the videos don't render -- I can hear it (if it has audio), but I can't see anything. A long time ago, I googled for a solution, and basically found none -- but I figured out that if I open a video in Irfanview, and then open a *second* video in a separate Irfanview instance, the second one works perfectly. And I've been suffering along with this method for ages. I finally figured out the root cause: Codecs. Aside from Irfanview, I also use the K-Lite media codec pack, because not being able to open an MP4 encoded in some arcane encoding format is horseshit. And at some point in the past, I must have picked it to use hardware encoding of some variety, instead of software. (Or it defaults to it.) THIS IS THE PROBLEM To fix, just updat
Read more