blog/data/2013-06-22-skolelinux-testsuite.txt

   1 Title: The value of a good distro wide test suite...
   2 Tags: english, debian edu
   3 Date: 2013-06-22 07:00
   4
   5 <p>In the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
   6 Skolelinux</a> project, we include a post-installation test suite,
   7 which check that services are running, working, and return the
   8 expected results.  It runs automatically just after the first boot on
   9 test installations (using test ISOs), but not on production
  10 installations (using non-test ISOs).  It test that the LDAP service is
  11 operating, Kerberos is responding, DNS is replying, file systems are
  12 online resizable, etc, etc.  And it check that the PXE service is
  13 configured, which is the topic of this post.</p>
  14
  15 <p>The last week I've fixed the DVD and USB stick ISOs for our Debian
  16 Edu Wheezy release.  These ISOs are supposed to be able to install a
  17 complete system without any Internet connection, but for that to
  18 happen all the needed packages need to be on them.  Thanks to our test
  19 suite, I discovered that we had forgotten to adjust our PXE setup to
  20 cope with the new names and paths used by the netboot d-i packages.
  21 When Internet connectivity was available, the installer fall back to
  22 using wget to fetch d-i boot images, but when offline it require
  23 working packages to get it working.  And the packages changed name
  24 from debian-installer-6.0-netboot-$arch to
  25 debian-installer-7.0-netboot-$arch, we no longer pulled in the
  26 packages during installation.  Without our test suite, I suspect we
  27 would never have discovered this before release.  Now it is fixed
  28 right after we got the ISOs operational.</p>
  29
  30 <p>Another by-product of the test suite is that we can ask system
  31 administrators with problems getting Debian Edu to work, to run the
  32 test suite using <tt>/usr/sbin/debian-edu-test-install</tt> and see if
  33 any errors are detected.  This usually pinpoint the subsystem causing
  34 the problem.</p>
  35
  36 <p>If you want to help us help kids learn how to share and create,
  37 please join us on
  38 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
  39 irc.debian.org</a> and the
  40 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@</a> mailing
  41 list.</p>