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+Title: The value of a good distro wide test suite...
+Tags: english, debian edu
+Date: 2013-06-22 07:00
+
+<p>In the <ahref="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
+Skolelinux</a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The last week I'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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <tt>/usr/sbin/debian-edu-test-install</tt> and see if
+any errors are detected.  This usually pinpoint the subsystem causing
+the problem.</p>
+
+<p>If you want to help us help kids learn how to share and create,
+please join us on
+<ahref="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
+irc.debian.org</a> and the
+<ahref="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@</a> mailing
+list.</p>