I just recently upgraded the computers here to Ubuntu Dapper from Breezy. On one of the computers I was trying to install webmin using apt-get, but with no luck. I finally found out that webmin was removed from the Ubuntu repository at the authors request. The instructions for setting up webmin under [...]

Posted in Administration, Linux No Comments »

Since part of my job entails system administration I get to spend a lot of time configuring, fixing, setting up, and tweaking computers. I’m currently setting up several servers and since my favorite Linux distribution of all time is Ubuntu, guess what I’m installing?
Ubuntu is a Debian derivative, and as such uses apt to [...]

Posted in Linux 4 Comments »

I’m not sure if this is the intended behavior or not, but I found a “feature” in PyFIT that had me smashing the keyboard with my face. According to the PyFIT documentation you should be able to create a table like this:

|TestClass|
|InputString |OutputNum |
|Hello World [...]

Posted in Python, Software Testing No Comments »

What? An Excel tip in a software testing blog? It seems I spend way too much time creating reports for my managers, so I do rely heavily on Excel. While creating a generic risk assessment spreadsheet I wanted to only allow certain values in some of the cells. After a quick [...]

Posted in Windows No Comments »

I’m really starting to get into this whole FIT/FitNesse thing. Creating test cases is now easy and my managers love the HTML documentation and results that come out of the tools. Until now I’ve just been using FitNesse, but thanks to the hard work of Grig Gheorghiu and John Roth (the PyFIT author) [...]

Posted in Python, Software Testing No Comments »

I was pretty proud of my latest Python script, which was designed to test a CORBA object. However, when I tried to run the script it gave me some obfuscated errors and died. So, for the last couple days I’ve been trying to figure out why my script was dying. It turns [...]

Posted in Python, Software Testing No Comments »

I’m a big fan of the KISS principle, so when I run into a utility that is simple, yet effective, I jump all over it. Recently, I found one such utility from Microsoft of all places.
The problem is that occasionally I need to mount an ISO image so I can access it like a [...]

Posted in Windows 2 Comments »

The FIT SequenceFixture is essentially the same as a DoFixture. I just like the way commands are written better. One of the cool things about a SequenceFixture (or DoFixture) is that it allows you to use other fixture types from within. So, you could have a RowFixture running some tests then decide [...]

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It is sometimes useful to pipe binary data over a ssh connection. I use this sometimes when I want to back up the data on a machine over the network without creating a backup file first.
 
tar -cf - dir_to_backup | ssh user@hostname ‘cat > backup.tar’

Posted in Linux No Comments »

On a typical project there are many different computers that I must use. For years I have been using scp to copy files from one computer to another and wishing for a way to just mount the SSH filesystem. Well, my wish finally came true!
The good news is that thanks to sshfs I [...]

Posted in Administration, Bash/Shell, Linux No Comments »