Autotesting

[bms at barwap.com (Brendan Sleight)]

Hi Antonio,

2008/7/31 Antonio Amorim wrote:
> I have used vncrobot http://www.vncrobot.com/ that is open to be used but
> not open source.

It is a shame that vncrobot is closed source as it has some really
nice features.

> The testing of our images is available on (for example):
> http://mirror.sim.ul.pt/paipix/paipix-en-amd64-8.5.25-tests/
> (see http://mirror.sim.ul.pt/paipix/ for other images)

The tests look really comprehensive. I particularly like the installation test.

> PAIPIX examples that it opens a broad range of possibilities for QA.

Agreed, the more testing methods the better, always good to make sure
the test tools work. I have concentrated on the boot-up process as the
rest of the system is un-altered Debian.

> It is not perfect but gives a hint of what would be a better system.
> The main problems are:
> ......
> is wrong. Furthermore, while the iso is booting, the graphical resolution
> changes and the vncrobot client has to be stopped and restarted
> automatically for these occasions.

This was I problem I had with Autotesting. The vncserver within qemu
was problematic. I used vncserver with a large resolution with qemu
runing within it as _full screen_.  Therefore the main vncserver
remains a fixed resolution whilst booting. A large resolution is
needed to avoid qemu SDL errors when (As far as I can tell) the qemu
resolution changes and qemu wants to exceed to the resolution of the
xserver qemu is running on. The code maybe explains this better.[1]

1: http://tiny.cc/gitAutotesting

> 3) Letters in other languages and extended keys are not well supported and
> have to be sent to the vnc server using special tricks.

I used the qemu sendkey command.

sendkey #0x33
sendkey ctrl-alt-f1

By using a telnet interface to the "- -monitor telnet:127.0.0.1:4444"
and well as
echo "sendkey $KEY" | socat - TCP4:127.0.0.1:4444

> I can send the full list of scripts and tools that I am using if any of you
> is interested.

I might have a look at the install to hardrive scripts used. [2]

2: http://mirror.sim.ul.pt/paipix/paipix-en-amd64-8.5.25-tests/igui/start_igui.html

Also this may be interesting [3]

3: http://joey.kitenet.net/blog/entry/d-i_install_testing_with_qemu_and_digress/

> Also, since I am using debian-live, I would be glad to setup one of our dell
> servers to test systematically the official debian-live images. The machines
> have 8 cores, 8 GB of memory and are running Debian etch. The KVM emulator
> works beutifully both for i386 and amd64 iso images.

One for Daniel or Chris to answer?

Always interesting to see how other are looking at the same problem.

Regards,
Brendan