Requesting assistance
From Peyton Hall Documentation
If you need help with something, whether it be a problem on your local workstation in Peyton Hall or something related to the network, it's simple to do. Send an email to help@astro, which goes into our trouble ticketing system.
You will get an automatic reply, with information about the ticket that was generated. *PLEASE NOTE* that any and all correspondence related to that ticket should be done through the help@astro address, and by keeping the "[astro.princeton.edu #xxx]" part of the subject line intact! This is how the ticketing software knows that the email pertains to an issue that already exists in the system, and doesn't generate a new ticket for the issue.
Once an administrator has taken ownership of the issue, they will respond to you through the Request Tracker software and you'll get an email back with any information.
In some cases, such as "Do you have a recent RedHat CD?", generating a trouble ticket might seem to be overkill when a simple email would suffice. However, this system keeps things running smoothly from the point of the administrators, and even simple emails like that are fine. For one, the email will go to all the administrators, and whomever responds to it can take ownership of the problem (meaning they're going to take care of it) so multiple people don't try to solve the same issue simultaneously. Also, when the issue is resolved, it leaves behind a series of notes that can be used to fix similar problems in the future, or at least show who solved the problem in the past. And in the case of the user asking for a CD, now everyone involved knows that someone did get a CD to you, and also if it needs to be returned then it's known who borrowed it.
