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[homepage.git] / blog / archive / 2013 / 06 / 06.rss

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                 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
 
        
+       <item>
+               <title>The value of a good distro wide test suite...</title>
+               <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_value_of_a_good_distro_wide_test_suite___.html</link>        
+               <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_value_of_a_good_distro_wide_test_suite___.html</guid>
+                <pubDate>Sat, 22 Jun 2013 07:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
+               <description>&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu /
+Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; project, we include a post-installation test suite,
+which check that services are running, working, and return the
+expected results.  It runs automatically just after the first boot on
+test installations (using test ISOs), but not on production
+installations (using non-test ISOs).  It test that the LDAP service is
+operating, Kerberos is responding, DNS is replying, file systems are
+online resizable, etc, etc.  And it check that the PXE service is
+configured, which is the topic of this post.&lt;/p&gt;
+
+&lt;p&gt;The last week I&#39;ve fixed the DVD and USB stick ISOs for our Debian
+Edu Wheezy release.  These ISOs are supposed to be able to install a
+complete system without any Internet connection, but for that to
+happen all the needed packages need to be on them.  Thanks to our test
+suite, I discovered that we had forgotten to adjust our PXE setup to
+cope with the new names and paths used by the netboot d-i packages.
+When Internet connectivity was available, the installer fall back to
+using wget to fetch d-i boot images, but when offline it require
+working packages to get it working.  And ad the packages changed name
+from debian-installer-6.0-netboot-$arch to
+debian-installer-7.0-netboot-$arch, we no longer pulled in the
+packages during installation.  Without our test suite, I suspect we
+would never have discovered this before release.  Now it is fixed
+right after we got the ISOs operational.&lt;/p&gt;
+
+&lt;p&gt;Another by-product of the test suite is that we can ask system
+administrators with problems getting Debian Edu to work, to run the
+test suite using &lt;tt&gt;/usr/sbin/debian-edu-test-install&lt;/tt&gt; and see if
+any errors are detected.  This usually pinpoint the subsystem causing
+the problem.&lt;/p&gt;
+
+&lt;p&gt;If you want to help us help kids learn how to share and create,
+please join us on
+&lt;a href=&quot;irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu&quot;&gt;#debian-edu on
+irc.debian.org&lt;/a&gt; and the
+&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/&quot;&gt;debian-edu@&lt;/a&gt; mailing
+list.&lt;/p&gt;
+</description>
+       </item>
+       
        <item>
                <title>Debian Edu interview: Victor Nițu</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html</link>