General Questions

Can I try out Bugzilla somewhere?

If you want to take a test ride, there are test installations at http://landfill.bugzilla.org/, ready to play with directly from your browser.

What license is Bugzilla distributed under?

Bugzilla is covered by the Mozilla Public License. See details at http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/.

How do I get commercial support for Bugzilla?

http://www.bugzilla.org/support/consulting.html is a list of companies and individuals who have asked us to list them as consultants for Bugzilla.

There are several experienced Bugzilla hackers on the mailing list/newsgroup who are willing to make themselves available for generous compensation. Try sending a message to the mailing list asking for a volunteer.

What major companies or projects are currently using Bugzilla for bug-tracking?

There are dozens of major companies with public Bugzilla sites to track bugs in their products. We have a fairly complete list available on our website at http://bugzilla.org/installation-list/. If you have an installation of Bugzilla and would like to be added to the list, whether it's a public install or not, simply e-mail Gerv <gerv@mozilla.org>.

Who maintains Bugzilla?

A core team, led by Dave Miller (justdave@bugzilla.org).

How does Bugzilla stack up against other bug-tracking databases?

Wikipedia maintains a "comparison of issue tracking systems".

In the experience of Matthew Barnson (the original author of this FAQ), though, Bugzilla offers superior performance on commodity hardware, better price (free!), more developer-friendly features (such as stored queries, email integration, and platform independence), improved scalability, greater flexibility, and superior ease-of-use when compared to commercial bug-tracking software.

If you happen to be a vendor for commercial bug-tracking software, and would like to submit a list of advantages your product has over Bugzilla, simply send it to <documentation@bugzilla.org> and we'd be happy to include the comparison in our documentation.

Why doesn't Bugzilla offer this or that feature or compatibility with this other tracking software?

It may be that the support has not been built yet, or that you have not yet found it. While Bugzilla makes strides in usability, customizability, scalability, and user interface with each release, that doesn't mean it can't still use improvement!

The best way to make an enhancement request is to file a bug at bugzilla.mozilla.org and set the Severity to 'enhancement'. Your 'request for enhancement' (RFE) will start out in the UNCONFIRMED state, and will stay there until someone with the ability to CONFIRM the bug reviews it. If that person feels it to be a good request that fits in with Bugzilla's overall direction, the status will be changed to NEW; if not, they will probably explain why and set the bug to RESOLVED/WONTFIX. If someone else has made the same (or almost the same) request before, your request will be marked RESOLVED/DUPLICATE, and a pointer to the previous RFE will be added.

Even if your RFE gets approved, that doesn't mean it's going to make it right into the next release; there are a limited number of developers, and a whole lot of RFEs... some of which are quite complex. If you're a code-hacking sort of person, you can help the project along by making a patch yourself that supports the functionality you require. If you have never contributed anything to Bugzilla before, please be sure to read the Developers' Guide and Contributors' Guide before going ahead.

Which versions support MySQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle? What about Sybase/Msql/MSSQL?

MySQL was originally chosen because it is free, easy to install, and was available for the hardware Netscape intended to run it on. This means all Bugzilla versions support MySQL.

Bugzilla 2.20 contains experimental support for PostgreSQL.

Bugzilla 2.22 contains complete, stable support for PostgreSQL. As of this release, using PostgreSQL with Bugzilla should be as stable as using MySQL. If you experience any problems with PostgreSQL compatibility, they will be taken as seriously as if you were running MySQL.

Red Hat once ran a version of Bugzilla that worked on Oracle, but that was long, long ago; that version (Bugzilla 2.8) is now obsolete, insecure, and totally unsupported. In August of 2005, Wim Coekaerts (Director of Linux Engineering at Oracle Corporation) wrote to Dave Miller confirming that Oracle intended to implement and support Bugzilla. Thanks to the help of some Oracle engineers, Bugzilla 3.2 is the first release to support Oracle.

Sybase support is no longer being worked on. Even if it eventually happens, it's VERY unlikely to work without the end-user-company having to stick a few developers on making several manual changes. Sybase is just NOT very standards-compliant (despite all the hype), and it turned out that way too much had to be changed to make it work -- like moving half of the application logic into stored procedures to get any kind of decent performance out of it. Bug 173130 is the relevant bug.

Bug 237862 is a good bug to read through if you'd like to see what progress is being made on general database compatibility.

What is /usr/bonsaitools/bin/perl?

Bugzilla used to have the path to perl on the shebang line set to /usr/bonsaitools/bin/perl because when Terry first started writing the code for mozilla.org he needed a version of Perl and other tools that were completely under his control. This location was abandoned for the 2.18 release in favor of the more sensible /usr/bin/perl. If you installed an older version of Bugzilla and created the symlink we suggested, you can remove it now (provided that you don't have anything else, such as Bonsai, using it and you don't intend to reinstall an older version of Bugzilla).

My perl is located at /usr/local/bin/perl and not /usr/bin/perl. Is there an easy to change that in all the files that have this hard-coded?

The easiest way to get around this is to create a link from one to the other: ln -s /usr/local/bin/perl /usr/bin/perl. If that's not an option for you, the following bit of perl magic will change all the shebang lines (that is to say, the line at the top of each file that starts with '#!' and contains the path) to something else:

perl -pi -e 's@#\!/usr/bin/perl@#\!/usr/local/bin/perl@' *cgi *pl

Sadly, this command-line won't work on Windows unless you also have Cygwin. However, MySQL comes with a binary called replace which can do the job:

C:\mysql\bin\replace "#!/usr/bin/perl" "#!C:\perl\bin\perl" -- *.cgi *.pl

If your perl path is something else again, just follow the above examples and replace /usr/local/bin/perl with your own perl path.

Once you've modified all your files, you'll also need to modify the t/002goodperl.t test, as it tests that all shebang lines are equal to /usr/bin/perl. (For more information on the test suite, please check out the appropriate section in the Developers' Guide.) Having done this, run the test itself:

perl runtests.pl 2 --verbose

to ensure that you've modified all the relevant files.

If using Apache on Windows, you can avoid the whole problem by setting the ScriptInterpreterSource directive to 'Registry'. (If using Apache 2 or higher, set it to 'Registry-Strict'.) ScriptInterperterSource requires a registry entry "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.cgi\Shell\ExecCGI\Command" to associate .cgi files with your perl executable. If one does not already exist, create it with a default value of "<full path to perl> -T %*", e.g. "C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe -T %*".

Make sure you close out the registry before trying it again. An export of the registry entry is: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.cgi\Shell\ExecCGI\Command] @="c:\\perl\\bin\\perl.exe -T %*"

Is there an easy way to change the Bugzilla cookie name?

At present, no.

Does bugzilla run under mod_perl?

Yes. You need to run Bugzilla 3.0 or newer. We recommend Bugzilla 3.0.3 or higher as significant improvements have been made in memory consumption.

How can Bugzilla be made to work under SELinux?

Unfortunately there are no step-by-step instructions, but the following URL contains hints on how to do it: http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/selinux-apache-fc3/sn-debugging-and-customizing.html

Managerial Questions

Is it possible to delete bug reports?

Yes. You have to turn on the 'allowbugdeletion' parameter, which is off by default. Note that you cannot delete bug reports one by one. You have to move them in a product or component, e.g. named "Trash", and then delete this product or component. The reason we make it hard is that you generally don't want to do that.

Is Bugzilla web-based, or do you have to have specific software or a specific operating system on your machine?

It is web and e-mail based.

Does Bugzilla allow us to define our own priorities and levels? Do we have complete freedom to change the labels of fields and format of them, and the choice of acceptable values?

Yes. You can edit the values of hardcoded fields but not their label. Since Bugzilla 3.0, you can even edit the list of valid resolutions and since Bugzilla 3.2, the list of legal bug statuses and transitions among them.

Moreover, Bugzilla 3.0 and newer allow you to add custom fields to Bugzilla from the UI. You can follow development of this feature in bug 91037

Does Bugzilla provide any reporting features, metrics, graphs, etc? You know, the type of stuff that management likes to see. :)

Yes. Look at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/report.cgi for samples of what Bugzilla can do in reporting and graphing. Fuller documentation is provided in Section 6.11.

If you can not get the reports you want from the included reporting scripts, it is possible to hook up a professional reporting package such as Crystal Reports using ODBC. If you choose to do this, beware that giving direct access to the database] does contain some security implications. Even if you give read-only access to the bugs database it will bypass the secure bugs features of Bugzilla.

Is there email notification? If so, what do you see when you get an email?

Email notification is user-configurable. By default, the bug id and summary of the bug report accompany each email notification, along with a list of the changes made.

Do users have to have any particular type of email application?

Bugzilla email is sent in plain text, the most compatible mail format on the planet.

If you decide to use the bugzilla_email integration features to allow Bugzilla to record responses to mail with the associated bug, you may need to caution your users to set their mailer to "respond to messages in the format in which they were sent".

For security reasons Bugzilla ignores HTML tags in comments, and if a user sends HTML-based email into Bugzilla the resulting comment looks downright awful.

Does Bugzilla allow data to be imported and exported? If I had outsiders write up a bug report using a MS Word bug template, could that template be imported into "matching" fields? If I wanted to take the results of a query and export that data to MS Excel, could I do that?

Bugzilla can output buglists as HTML (the default), CSV or RDF. The link for CSV can be found at the bottom of the buglist in HTML format. This CSV format can easily be imported into MS Excel or other spreadsheet applications.

To use the RDF format of the buglist it is necessary to append a &ctype=rdf to the URL. RDF is meant to be machine readable and thus it is assumed that the URL would be generated programmatically so there is no user visible link to this format.

Currently the only script included with Bugzilla that can import data is importxml.pl which is intended to be used for importing the data generated by the XML ctype of show_bug.cgi in association with bug moving. Any other use is left as an exercise for the user.

There are also scripts included in the contrib/ directory for using e-mail to import information into Bugzilla, but these scripts are not currently supported and included for educational purposes.

Has anyone converted Bugzilla to another language to be used in other countries? Is it localizable?

Yes, Bugzilla is fully localizable. For more information including available translated templates, see http://www.bugzilla.org/download.html#localizations. At this point, Bugzilla 3.0 is available in 8 different languages, and Bugzilla 3.2 in 5 languages.

Can a user create and save reports? Can they do this in Word format? Excel format?

Yes. No. Yes (using the CSV format).

Are there any backup features provided?

You should use the commands included with your database software to run the backups of your Bugzilla data. You can find strategies for dealing with backup considerations at http://www.mysql.com/doc/B/a/Backup.html for MySQL and at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/static/backup.html for PostgreSQL.

What type of human resources are needed to be on staff to install and maintain Bugzilla? Specifically, what type of skills does the person need to have? I need to find out what types of individuals would we need to hire and how much would that cost if we were to go with Bugzilla vs. buying an "out-of-the-box" solution.

If Bugzilla is set up correctly from the start, continuing maintenance needs are minimal and can be done easily using the web interface.

Commercial Bug-tracking software typically costs somewhere upwards of $20,000 or more for 5-10 floating licenses. Bugzilla consultation is available from skilled members of the newsgroup. Simple questions are answered there and then.

What time frame are we looking at if we decide to hire people to install and maintain the Bugzilla? Is this something that takes hours or days to install and a couple of hours per week to maintain and customize, or is this a multi-week install process, plus a full time job for 1 person, 2 people, etc?

It all depends on your level of commitment. Someone with much Bugzilla experience can get you up and running in less than a day, and your Bugzilla install can run untended for years. If your Bugzilla strategy is critical to your business workflow, hire somebody to who has reasonable Perl skills, and a familiarity with the operating system on which Bugzilla will be running, and have them handle your process management, bug-tracking maintenance, and local customization.

Is there any licensing fee or other fees for using Bugzilla? Any out-of-pocket cost other than the bodies needed as identified above?

No. Bugzilla, Perl, the Template Toolkit, and all other support software needed to make Bugzilla work can be downloaded for free. MySQL and PostgreSQL -- databases supported by Bugzilla -- are also open-source, but they ask that if you find their product valuable, you purchase a support contract from them that suits your needs.

We don't like referring to problems as 'bugs'. Can we change that?

Yes! As of Bugzilla 2.18, it is a simple matter to change the word 'bug' into whatever word/phrase is used by your organization. See the documentation on Customization for more details, specifically Section 5.1.5.

Administrative Questions

Does Bugzilla provide record locking when there is simultaneous access to the same bug? Does the second person get a notice that the bug is in use or how are they notified?

Bugzilla does not lock records. It provides mid-air collision detection -- which means that it warns a user when a commit is about to conflict with commits recently made by another user, and offers the second user a choice of options to deal with the conflict.

Can users be on the system while a backup is in progress?

Yes. You should use the commands included with your database software to run the backups of your Bugzilla data. You can find strategies for dealing with backup considerations at http://www.mysql.com/doc/B/a/Backup.html for MySQL and at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/static/backup.html for PostgreSQL.

How can I update the code and the database using CVS?

Make a backup of both your Bugzilla directory and the database. For the Bugzilla directory this is as easy as doing cp -rp bugzilla bugzilla.bak. For the database, there's a number of options - see the MySQL docs and pick the one that fits you best (the easiest is to just make a physical copy of the database on the disk, but you have to have the database server shut down to do that without risking dataloss).
Make the Bugzilla directory your current directory.
Use cvs -q update -AdP if you want to update to the tip or cvs -q update -dP -rTAGNAME if you want a specific version (in that case you'll have to replace TAGNAME with a CVS tag name such as BUGZILLA-2_16_5).
- If you've made no local changes, this should be very clean. If you have made local changes, then watch the cvs output for C results. If you get any lines that start with a C it means there were conflicts between your local changes and what's in CVS. You'll need to fix those manually before continuing.
After resolving any conflicts that the cvs update operation generated, running ./checksetup.pl will take care of updating the database for you as well as any other changes required for the new version to operate.
- Once you run checksetup.pl, the only way to go back is to restore the database backups. You can't "downgrade" the system cleanly under most circumstances.

See also the instructions in Section3.12.2.1.

How do I make it so that bugs can have an UNCONFIRMED status?

To use the UNCONFIRMED status, you must have the 'usevotes' parameter set to "On". You must then visit the editproducts.cgi page and set the " Number of votes a bug in this product needs to automatically get out of the UNCONFIRMED state" to be a non-zero number. (You will have to do this for each product that wants to use the UNCONFIRMED state.) If you do not actually want users to be able to vote for bugs entered against this product, leave the "Maximum votes per person" value at '0'.

There is work being done to decouple the UNCONFIRMED state from the 'usevotes' parameter for future versions of Bugzilla. Follow the discussion and progress at bug 162060.

How do I move a Bugzilla installation from one machine to another?

1. Use mysqldump to make a backup of the bugs database. For a typical Bugzilla setup, such a command might look like this:

 mysqldump -u(username) -p(password) bugs > bugzilla-backup.sql

See the mysqldump documentation for more information on using the tool.

Note: Depending on the size of your database, and the power of your machine, the mysqldump command could be running long enough that the password would be visible to someone using the ps command. If you are on a multi-user machine, and this is a concern to you, create an entry in the file ~/.my.cnf that looks like this:

[mysqldump]
user=bugs
password=mypassword

and then leave the '-u' and '-p' params out of the command line.

2. On your new machine, follow the instructions found in Chapter 2 as far as setting up the physical environment of the new machine with perl, webserver, modules, etc.

3. You have to preserve the data directory and localconfig file from the old Bugzilla installation. So make sure to copy those from your old Bugzilla directory into your new Bugzilla directory. The new Bugzilla can be the same version you were running on the old server, or it can be a newer version.

4. If the new URL to your Bugzilla installation is different from the old one, you have to update the "urlbase" parameter in data/params (e.g. using a text editor). Else you may be redirected to your old installation when you log in.

5. If anything about your database configuration changed (location of the server, username, password, etc.) as part of the move, you'll need to update the appropriate variables in the localconfig file before taking the next step.

6. Copy the bugzilla-backup.sql file from your old server to the new one.

7. Create an empty "bugs" database on the new server. First, log in to your MySQL server like:

 mysql -u root -p

Enter your MySQL root pasword when prompted. Then create the database. If your old installlation was Bugzilla 3.2 or higher and had the "utf8" parameter turned on, then you need to do this command:

 CREATE DATABASE bugs DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8;

If your old installation was before Bugzilla 3.2, or was Bugzilla 3.2 and higher with the utf8 parameter turned 'off, you must do:

 CREATE DATABASE bugs DEFAULT CHARACTER SET latin1;

8. Exit MySQL, and import your bugzilla-backup.sql file into your new "bugs" database:

 mysql -u (username) -p(password) bugs < /path/to/bugzilla-backup.sql

If you get an error about "packet too large" or "mysql server has gone away", you need to adjust the max_allowed_packet setting in your my.cnf (usually in /etc/my.cnf) file to be larger than the largest attachment ever added to your Bugzilla.

If there are any errors during this step, you have to drop the database, create it again using the step above, and do the import again.

Note: If you are importing from a version of MySQL earlier than 4.1, you have to specify --default-character-set=latin1 when importing the dump, or your database will be very strange and possibly corrupted, when imported.

9. Change to the new Bugzilla directory and run checksetup.pl. Everything at this point works exactly like the normal "Upgrading" or "Configuration" sections from the Bugzilla Guide.

Bugzilla Security

How do I completely disable MySQL security if it's giving me problems? (I've followed the instructions in the installation section of this guide...)

Run MySQL like this: mysqld --skip-grant-tables. Please remember that this makes MySQL as secure as taping a $100 to the floor of a football stadium bathroom for safekeeping.

This can't be stressed enough. Doing this is a bad idea. Please consult Section 4.2 of this guide and the MySQL documentation for better solutions.

Are there any security problems with Bugzilla?

The Bugzilla code has undergone a reasonably complete security audit, and user-facing CGIs run under Perl's taint mode. However, it is recommended that you closely examine permissions on your Bugzilla installation, and follow the recommended security guidelines found in The Bugzilla Guide.

Email

I have a user who doesn't want to receive any more email from Bugzilla. How do I stop it entirely for this user?

The user can stop Bugzilla from sending any mail by unchecking all boxes on the 'Preferences' -> 'Email Preferences' page. (As of 2.18, this is made easier by the addition of a 'Disable All Mail' button.) Alternately, an administrator can disable all bugmails for this user from the administrative pages. This will override their personal preferences, and they will never be sent mail again.

I'm evaluating/testing Bugzilla, and don't want it to send email to anyone but me. How do I do it?

To disable email, set the mail_delivery_method parameter to none (2.20 and later), or

$enableSendMail

parameter to '0' in either BugMail.pm (2.18 and later) or processmail (up to 2.16.x).

Up to 2.16.x, changing

$enableSendMail

will only affect bugmail; email related to password changes, email address changes, bug imports, flag changes, etc. will still be sent out. As of the final release of 2.18, however, the above step will disable all mail sent from Bugzilla for any purpose.

To have bugmail (and only bugmail) redirected to you instead of its intended recipients, leave

$enableSendMail

alone; instead, edit "template/en/default/email/newchangedmail.txt.tmpl" as follows:

Replace "To:" with "X-Real-To:"
Add a "To: <your_email_address>"

I want whineatnews.pl to whine at something other than new and reopened bugs. How do I do it?

For older versions of Bugzilla, you may be able to apply Klaas Freitag's patch for "whineatassigned", which can be found in bug 6679. Note that this patch was made in 2000, so it may take some work to apply cleanly to any releases of Bugzilla newer than that, but you can use it as a starting point.

An updated (and much-expanded) version of this functionality is due to be released as part of Bugzilla 2.20; see bug 185090 for the discussion, and for more up-to-date patches if you just can't wait.

How do I set up the email interface to submit/change bugs via email?

On older versions, you can find an updated README.mailif file in the contrib/ directory of your Bugzilla distribution that walks you through the setup.

On Version 3.0.x, read this API documentation about using email_in.pl. the script receives a message file as a command line parameter, and processes it.

Email takes FOREVER to reach me from Bugzilla -- it's extremely slow. What gives?

If you are using sendmail, try enabling sendmailnow in editparams.cgi. For earlier versions of sendmail, one could achieve significant performance improvement in the UI (at the cost of delaying the sending of mail) by setting this parameter to off. Sites with sendmail version 8.12 (or higher) should leave this on, as they will not see any performance benefit.

If you are using an alternate MTA, make sure the options given in Bugzilla/BugMail.pm and any other place where sendmail is called are correct for your MTA.

How come email from Bugzilla changes never reaches me?

Double-check that you have not turned off email in your user preferences. Confirm that Bugzilla is able to send email by visiting the "Log In" link of your Bugzilla installation and clicking the "Submit Request" button after entering your email address.

If you never receive mail from Bugzilla, chances are you do not have sendmail in "/usr/lib/sendmail". Ensure sendmail lives in, or is symlinked to, "/usr/lib/sendmail".

If you are using an MTA other than sendmail the sendmailnow param must be set to on or no mail will be sent.

Database

I think my database might be corrupted, or contain invalid entries. What do I do?

Run the "sanity check" utility (sanitycheck.cgi) from your web browser to see! If it finishes without errors, you're probably OK. If it doesn't come back OK (i.e. any red letters), there are certain things Bugzilla can recover from and certain things it can't. If it can't auto-recover, I hope you're familiar with mysqladmin commands or have installed another way to manage your database. Sanity Check, although it is a good basic check on your database integrity, by no means is a substitute for competent database administration and avoiding deletion of data. It is not exhaustive, and was created to do a basic check for the most common problems in Bugzilla databases.

I want to manually edit some entries in my database. How?

There is no facility in Bugzilla itself to do this. It's also generally not a smart thing to do if you don't know exactly what you're doing. If you understand SQL, though, you can use the mysql command line utility to manually insert, delete and modify table information. There are also more intuitive GUI clients available. Personal favorites of the Bugzilla team are phpMyAdmin and MySQL Control Center.

Remember, backups are your friend. Everyone makes mistakes, and it's nice to have a safety net in case you mess something up. Consider using mysqldump to make a duplicate of your database before altering it manually.

I think I've set up MySQL permissions correctly, but Bugzilla still can't connect.

Try running MySQL from its binary: mysqld --skip-grant-tables. This will allow you to completely rule out grant tables as the cause of your frustration. If this Bugzilla is able to connect at this point then you need to check that you have granted proper permission to the user password combo defined in localconfig.

Running MySQL with this command line option is very insecure and should only be done when not connected to the external network as a troubleshooting step.

You may also be suffering from a client version mismatch:

MySQL 4.1 and up uses an authentication protocol based on a password hashing algorithm that is incompatible with that used by older clients. If you upgrade the server to 4.1, attempts to connect to it with an older client may fail with the following message:

shell> mysql Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client

To solve this problem, you should use one of the following approaches:

   * Upgrade all client programs to use a 4.1.1 or newer client library.
   * When connecting to the server with a pre-4.1 client program, use an account that still has a pre-4.1-style password.
   * Reset the password to pre-4.1 style for each user that needs to use a pre-4.1 client program. This can be done using the SET PASSWORD statement and the OLD_PASSWORD() function:

     mysql> SET PASSWORD FOR
         -> ' some_user '@' some_host ' = OLD_PASSWORD(' newpwd ');

How do I synchronize bug information among multiple different Bugzilla databases?

Well, you can synchronize or you can move bugs. Synchronization will only work one way -- you can create a read-only copy of the database at one site, and have it regularly updated at intervals from the main database.

MySQL has some synchronization features built-in to the latest releases. It would be great if someone looked into the possibilities there and provided a report to the newsgroup on how to effectively synchronize two Bugzilla installations.

If you simply need to transfer bugs from one Bugzilla to another, checkout the "move.pl" script in the Bugzilla distribution.

Windows

What is the easiest way to run Bugzilla on Win32 (Win98+/NT/2K)?

Remove Windows. Install Linux. Install Bugzilla. The boss will never know the difference. B^)

Seriously though, making Bugzilla work easily with Windows was one of the major goals of the 2.18 milestone. If the necessary components are in place (perl, a webserver, an MTA, etc.) then installation of Bugzilla on a Windows box should be no more difficult than on any other platform. As with any installation, we recommend that you carefully and completely follow the installation instructions in Section 2.4.1.

While doing so, don't forget to check out the very excellent guide to Installing Bugzilla on Microsoft Windows written by Byron Jones. Thanks, Byron!

Is there a "Bundle::Bugzilla" equivalent for Win32?

Not currently. Bundle::Bugzilla enormously simplifies Bugzilla installation on UNIX systems. If someone can volunteer to create a suitable PPM bundle for Win32, it would be appreciated.

CGI's are failing with a "something.cgi is not a valid Windows NT application" error. Why?

Depending on what Web server you are using, you will have to configure the Web server to treat *.cgi files as CGI scripts. In IIS, you do this by adding *.cgi to the App Mappings with the <path>\perl.exe %s %s as the executable.

Microsoft has some advice on this matter, as well:

"Set application mappings. In the ISM, map the extension for the script file(s) to the executable for the script interpreter. For example, you might map the extension .py to Python.exe, the executable for the Python script interpreter. Note For the ActiveState Perl script interpreter, the extension '.pl' is associated with PerlIS.dll by default. If you want to change the association of .pl to perl.exe, you need to change the application mapping. In the mapping, you must add two percent (%) characters to the end of the pathname for perl.exe, as shown in this example: c:\perl\bin\perl.exe %s %s"

I'm having trouble with the perl modules for NT not being able to talk to the database.

Your modules may be outdated or inaccurate. Try:

Hitting http://www.activestate.com/ActivePerl
Download ActivePerl
Go to your prompt
Type 'ppm'
PPM> install DBI DBD-mysql GD

I reckon TimeDate and Data::Dumper come with the activeperl. You can check the ActiveState site for packages for installation through PPM. http://www.activestate.com/Packages/.

How do I set up Bugzilla to use the Windows SMTP service?

In order to send bugmail, Bugzilla needs access to an SMTP server. You could probably use your ISP SMTP server (and maybe ask him to set up a seperate account for Bugzilla), but it is also possible to use the SMTP service included in Windows XP Pro, as well as the various Server 2003 versions.

First, install the service. in Windows XP, this is done from Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs > Add/Remove Windows Components, select Internet Information Services, press the Details button, and check SMTP Service. For Windows Server 2003, there's a nice tutorial here, though I suspect you don't need the POP3 service configured if you only need Bugzilla to send mail, and not receive mail.

Bugzilla doesn't support mail authentication yet. This means you will have to allow anonymous relay on the service.

Note: if your server is exposed to the internet, this could be a security problem. It will allow spammers to use your SMTP service to relay messages to other people without your knowledge, so this set up should be done only if the server is not accessible from the public internet.

In order to allow anonymous outbound messages, open the Computer Management console from Control Panel > Administrative Tools, open the Services and Applications branch on the left, Open the Internet Information Services branch, right-click on Default SMTP Virtual Server and select Properties. In the Access tab, press the Relay button, and select All except the list below, and leave the list empty. Uncheck Allow all computers which successfully authenticate to relay..., and press OK.

In order to limit the computers that can connect to the SMTP server to the one running Bugzilla, and so prevent the possibility of turning your machine into a spam bot, you should add the IP address of the Bugzilla server to the list (or the IP range of your LAN, if you want to allow others on your network to send mail from this server), via the Add... button.

If the server is not a member of a domain, outgoing messages will have the name of the server on the local network as the domain part of outgoing messages' "From" field. This will prevent the message from being delivered to most e-mail services. To correct this, open the Delivery tab and click the Advanced button. In the Masquerade domain field, enter the domain of your ISP, or whatever domain you use to receive email and click OK. While on the Delivery tab, you might want to shorten the time to the first delivery attempt, from 15 minutes to 1 (this parameter needs further investigation).

After masquerading your domain, you will also need to change the mailfrom field in Bugzilla's main configuration page (/editparams.cgi), in the Email section, to the full name, including the domain. E.g. bugzilla-deamon@example.com.

The Bugzilla FAQ

Bugzilla:FAQ