Testing

Testing Prereleases

Before each release, several prereleases will be tagged. It is helpful to have users test these releases (when feasible) because it is hard to replicate the full range of potential reconfiguration situations; between different operating systems, system management tools, and configuration specification variation, there can be large differences between sites.

For more details please visit Tracking Development Releases of Bcfg2 .

Upgrade Testing

This section describes upgrade procedures to completely test the client and server. These procedures can be used for either pre-release testing, or for confidence building in a new release.

Server Testing

  1. Ensure that the server produces the same configurations for clients

  • Before the upgrade, generate all client configurations using the buildall subcommand of bcfg2-info. This subcommand takes a directory argument; it will generate one client configuration in each file, naming each according to the client name.

    mgt1:~/bcfg# bcfg2-info
Filesystem check 1 of 25
...
> buildall /path/to/cf-old
Generated config for fs2.bgl.mcs.anl.gov in 1.97310400009 seconds
Generated config for fs13.bgl.mcs.anl.gov in 1.47958016396 seconds
...
Take notice of any messages produced during configuration generation. These generally reflect minor issues in the configuration specification. Ideally, they should be fixed.

  • Upgrade the server software

  • Generate all client configurations in a second location using the new software. Any tracebacks reflect bugs, and should be filed in the ticketing system. Any new messages should be carefully examined.

  • Compare each file in the old directory to those in the new directory using bcfg2-admin compare -r /old/directory /new/directory

    mgt1:~/bcfg# bcfg2-admin compare -r cf-old/ cf-new/
Entry: fs2.bgl.mcs.anl.gov.xml
Entry: fs2.bgl.mcs.anl.gov.xml good
Entry: fs13.bgl.mcs.anl.gov.xml
Entry: fs13.bgl.mcs.anl.gov.xml good
Entry: login1.bgl.mcs.anl.gov.xml
 Path /bin/whatami contents differ
 Path /bin/whatami differs (in bundle softenv)
Entry: login1.bgl.mcs.anl.gov.xml bad

    This can be used to compare configurations for single clients, or different clients.

  1. Compare old and new group diagrams (using bcfg2-admin viz)

Client Testing

Run the client in dry-run and non-dry-run mode; ensure that multiple runs produce consistent results.