Factory

There is this thing I do at work. It is a factory of sorts. I make nightly builds for software development. It takes hours to build on several servers. I have scripts that do the builds unattended. If they work over night. It takes me a half hour or so to make sure things worked and check around on the boxes. If something doesn't work, it takes all day to get back to where I wanted to be that morning. All day.

Friday it didn't work. It took all day to get things right. Today, it worked. It took about a half hour to get things ready to install.

It turned out that there was  a bug in the software (no one's fault, these things happen) and no one wanted it installed. Hey, that's what development is all about.

So, I took some time to set up the factory to kick off the evening tests. Ran the first set this evening along side the nightly builds. It is so nice having scripts to do this diabolically tedious stuff. It is nice when it works.

I have it running vncserver and sending the tests to the vnc without actually logging in to each box and kicking things off by hand. Massive time saver and it means I can sit at my own workstation when gathering data from all the boxes. The only trouble is older versions of vnc on some of the boxes. It may not support copying and pasting text. That will slow things down a bit, but not too bad. At least we don't have a bunch of RH9 boxes any more.Red Hat 9 came out in 2003 or so. That is still much newer than Windows 2000 that a bunch of people still use.