auxesis' musings - Latest Comments

Re: Web app integration testing for sysadmins with cucumber-nagios

Edgard — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:47:30 -0000

I think cucumber-nagios is the tool I'm looking for but, just in case, ... I have a website completely written in Flex (a HTML wrapper and then... a lot of SWF files). And Nagios. ¿Can I use cucumber-nagios to test the website written in Flex? (it is very difficult to find a tool who can navigate a flex site).

Thank you very much

Re: Setting session name in screen

Sebastian — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:43:48 -0000

Can I actually display the session name in the status line? I found %S in the screen documentation ( http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/manual/scree...), but this would only show me some strange "S[1-5]" not the actual name given by "screen -S name"

thanks for your help

Re: Graphing collectd statistics in the browser with Visage

gefered — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 18:33:32 -0000

re the axis labels; why not plot a 'reduced' epoch time, eg (time-124350000) and label the x axis appropriately.
You know the length of time to be shown, so use that to work out how many digits to leave unsubtracted.
For bonus points, "round" the value you subtract to be on a day, hour or minute boundary, depending on the length of the interval being shown.
It would also be useful to display the subtracted value as a human-readable time.

Re: Graphing collectd statistics in the browser with Visage

auxesis — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 12:24:58 -0000

Hi Jug,
There are detailed installation and configuration instructions on Visage's project page on GitHub: http://github.com/auxesis/visage

GitHub already provides a tarball of the project that you can download: go to the project page, and click the "Download Source" link.

You're more than welcome to contribute an easier install method if you think the current one is lacking.

Thanks!
Lindsay

Re: Graphing collectd statistics in the browser with Visage

Jug — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 12:10:49 -0000

Well I had a look at this but couldn't figure out how to install and use it :( Wouldn't it be easier to provide maybe a tar file?

Re: Searching for the perfect presentation toolchain

auxesis — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 01:47:55 -0000

Actually it's a Thinkpad-ism. I'm using an X61s with a native resolution of 1024x768.

So yes, for most people that xrandr fragment would be boned, but for me it works perfectly. Salt to taste. :-)

Re: Searching for the perfect presentation toolchain

jeremy23 — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 01:30:55 -0000

You have this in your Rake task:

system("xrandr --output VGA --mode 1024x768")
system("xrandr --output VGA --same-as LVDS")

Are you sure you didn't mean this?

system("xrandr --output LVDS --mode 1024x768")
system("xrandr --output VGA --same-as LVDS")

Reason why I ask is because you're setting your VGA first to 1024x768, but then you're just overwriting it with whatever your LVDS has, which if it's a newer laptop, is most likely some quasi-widescreen mode.

Re: Dealing with a bank and being a sole trader

auxesis — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:53:10 -0000

Oh right, and if I'd done a whois I would have seen an Australian address.

Re: Dealing with a bank and being a sole trader

auxesis — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:51:42 -0000

Oh, my mistake. :-) I looked at the domain of your email address, saw contact details, plugged them into Google Maps, got an NZ address.

Re: Dealing with a bank and being a sole trader

Arvind — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:20:18 -0000

I'm in Australia. I was in NZ until 4 months ago - how come you thought I'm over there?

Re: Dealing with a bank and being a sole trader

auxesis — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:06:37 -0000

I can't comment on NZ tax law, but under the Australian laws there's no requirement that businesses use a business banking account - it's purely a game the banks like to play to charge you higher fees.

I'd double check with your accountant, but I'd bet the NZ laws are identical to the Australian ones.

Re: Dealing with a bank and being a sole trader

Arvind — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 20:15:57 -0000

I just called ANZ on this very issue, and the guy on the other end said that it *is* a legal thing that a business uses a business account. I *will* do my own research now. It strikes me that it really can't be illegal to use alternative commercial products if you're a business.

Re: gotgastro.com launched

auxesis — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 03:08:01 -0000

Hey Nick, thanks for pointing that out - quite embarrassing! I'll get it renewed quick smart.

Re: gotgastro.com launched

Nick J — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 02:41:42 -0000

gotgastro seems to be down - maybe the domain needs to be renewed - http://whois.domaintools.com/gotgastro.com ? It's a useful site, hopefully you decide to keep it going.

Re: http://holmwood.id.au/~lindsay/2009/11/09/behaviour-driven-infrastructure-through-cucumber/

auxesis — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:31:15 -0000

Sounds really cool. Do you think your steps would be usable for other people?

Re: http://holmwood.id.au/~lindsay/2009/11/09/behaviour-driven-infrastructure-through-cucumber/

kisoku — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:52:23 -0000

cool stuff. I've been doing similar stuff with cucumber at work. Most recently using cucumber to test a DNS server migration.

Re: http://holmwood.id.au/~lindsay/2009/11/09/behaviour-driven-infrastructure-through-cucumber/

holoway42 — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:59:32 -0000

Sweet - I'll fork cucumber-nagios and see what I can pluck from Chef.

Re: http://holmwood.id.au/~lindsay/2009/11/09/behaviour-driven-infrastructure-through-cucumber/

auxesis — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:43:25 -0000

Having a common library of steps that all config management or systems testing tools can use makes a lot of sense.

Maybe the path to get there would be to hack on cucumber-nagios now, and move stuff out to another library when it reaches a critical mass?

Re: http://holmwood.id.au/~lindsay/2009/11/07/slides-from-devopsdays/

auxesis — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:24:32 -0000

Hi Rudy,
Nice to hear from you again, and thanks for the compliments on my slides. :-)

I blogged a few months ago about the toolchain I use to build my presentations over here: http://holmwood.id.au/~lindsay/2009/09/18/searc...

To find photos, I use the Flickr Advanced Search http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/?q=bloemen with a Creative Commons filter. Generally i'll leave a comment on the photo if I use it in more than one presentation or I really like it. I've made a few Flickr friends that way, and people like to know their photos have been used in cool places. :-)

Hope that helps!

Re: http://holmwood.id.au/~lindsay/2009/11/07/slides-from-devopsdays/

Rudy Gevaert — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:38:58 -0000

Hi Lindsay,

We briefly spoke on devopsdays on Friday. I forgot to mention to you I really liked your presentation: the content and the graphics. I was wondering which program do you use the make the presentations. And how did you find the nice pictures on flickr?

Re: http://holmwood.id.au/~lindsay//2009/11/09/behaviour-driven-infrastructure-through-cucumber/

aslakhellesoy — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:56:19 -0000

Thanks for the confirmation. Back to hacking then -:)

Re: http://holmwood.id.au/~lindsay//2009/11/09/behaviour-driven-infrastructure-through-cucumber/

auxesis — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:47:12 -0000

Hey Aslak,
From a quick bit of testing, the Gherkin lexer doesn't appear to work that well with unicode characters. You can see an example page I whipped up here: http://holmwood.id.au/~lindsay/pygments-gherkin...

Hope that helps!

Re: http://holmwood.id.au/~lindsay//2009/11/09/behaviour-driven-infrastructure-through-cucumber/

aslakhellesoy — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:33:15 -0000

Lindsay, completely off topic question: I see you're using the Pygments lexer for Gherkin in your blog - which looks great. How does it handle features unicode characters, such as Chinese or Russian? (There are examples under examples/i18n). The lexer has support for all Cucumber languages built-in, but I've had some encoding issues, which may or may not be present on your end :-)

Re: http://holmwood.id.au/~lindsay/2009/11/09/behaviour-driven-infrastructure-through-cucumber/

holoway42 — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:54:50 -0000

I'm certainly not opposed to it being cucumber-nagios. My only real thought down that road would be that I would love to re-use that bundle within Chef's own test suite (making it a build-time dependency, essentially.) That can be cucumber-nagios, or it could be a third project that Chef, cucumber-nagios, Puppet, and anyone else who wants them can use.

I'm happy to port all the steps that make sense from Chef's test suite (things like checking files for strings, stat() responses, permissions and ownership, even things like what version a package is at) and stick them where-ever makes sense.

Re: http://holmwood.id.au/~lindsay/2009/11/09/behaviour-driven-infrastructure-through-cucumber/

auxesis — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:43:51 -0000

Sounds great. :-) There were similar things said on the aforementioned Puppet mailing list thread.

Not to be egotistical, but maybe the project should be cucumber-nagios? It already has a great library of web interactions, it bundles Cucumber easily, and plugs straight into your monitoring system.

What do you think?