Manage Tester

Managing a Tester System

A tester system is one where the assignment testing occurs, most often by running a virtual machine and testing the assignment inside that. Assignments are sent from a storer system, they are placed in a queue for the tester and then picked up from the queue and tested/checked (inside an environment such as a virtual machine). Results from the testing/checking phase are sent out back to the storer.

Overview

A tester system for vmchecker consists of two sets of components: executors and queue managers.

An executor is a process that starts up the testing environment (most often a virtual machine), grabs an assignment and a test archive, kick off the checking phase and grabs back the results. An executor manages a given kind of environment (for example VMware, VirtualBox, KVM and so on). There is usually only a single executor type on a given tester system, for a particular type of environment (i.e. virtual machine implementation/hypervisor).

There is a queue manager for each class. Each class uses a Unix account and stores information about the executor and queue manager. A queue manager would handle check requests for a given class and kick of the executor for the class virtual machine.

Unix Account Folder Structure

Each class requires a Unix account. Inside the Unix account one stores the folder structure for queue managers and virtual machines for the class. Typically you would store the queue manager configuration in a tester/ subfolder and the virtual machines in a vm/ subfolder. A sample folder listing (for the asm account on the checker.cs.pub.ro tester system) is shown below:

asm@checker:~$ tree --charset ASCII -L 3 -F
.
|-- tester/
|   |-- callback_sftp.log
|   |-- config
|   |-- queue/
|   |-- queue-manager.log
|   `-- tmpunzip/
`-- vm/
    `-- 2015/
        |-- iocla-linux/
        `-- iocla.zip

In the folder listing, the vm/ subfolder stores the iocla-linux/ virtual machine and the tester/ subfolder stores the queue manager configuration files:

• config is the actual configuration file for the queue manager
• the queue/ subfolder is the assignment queue; assignments sent out from the storer are placed in this folder
• the queue-manager.log file stores logging messages output by the queue manager
• the tmpunzip/ subfolder is used for unpacking the current assignment
• the callback_sftp.log file stores logging information from when results from an assignment are sent back to the storer system