* * * * *
The network? A firewall? A bug? A misconfiguration? Gremlins? Who knows?
> “In a system of a million parts, if each part malfunctions only one time
> out of a million, a breakdown is certain.”
>
> —Stanislaw Lem
>
So it's Regression Test Time™ again (for “Project: Wolowizard [1]”) at The
Ft. Lauderdale Office of the Corporation, only this time, with new, addtional
regression tests!
Joy.
Okay, it's not too bad. It's a rather simple matter to add the cases to a
master list of test cases and expand the program that uses this list to
generate the data used for the regression test. That was probably about an
hour or so of work. Then a minor change to the actual test program to make
sure it fires off the messages under the right conditions (two different
messages, ten cases, a 100×100 matrix, but easy enough to code).
Then, generate all the data, copy it all out to the four servers required to
run the test, get the latest build of all the programs, move them out to the
test servers, make sure the configuration files are up to date on all the
servers, make sure The Protocol Stack From Hell™ won't puke, and fire up the
regression test.
Only to have one component fail each test because it can't communicate with
another component.
Aaaaaarg!
SM and I spent the next few hours troubleshooting the issue. The two
components are on different servers, but they can see each other. Doing a
manual query at the command line shows the query going through. But something
deep within the bowels (maybe below the cockles, maybe in the sub-cockle
area, maybe in the liver, maybe in the kidneys, maybe even in the colon. We
don't know … [2]) of “Project: Wolowizard” is munged.
Sigh.
[1]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2010/10/11.1
[2]
http://www.stlyrics.com/songs/d/denisleary6392/asshole375206.html
Email author at
[email protected]
