Lick the light switch

I have just visited the eBox team room and I have discovered a really nice project they are working on. José Antonio Calvo (aka Josh) is creating a really cool suite of programs called ANSTE that allows a developer to define network scenarios and run tests easily on them.

We are going to use it to perform continuous integration for eBox, running a test of suites nightly to ensure that every module works correctly, which includes stuff like setting up two separate networks, connect them with the OpenVPN eBox module and checking connectivity through the vpn interfaces or ensuring that the traffic shaping module really does its job.

Josh’s work is not this far yet, but ANSTE is already able to read XML scenario definition files like this one and generate the Xen virtual machines as specified, with the appropiate software, virtual interfaces, routes, … as defined by the scenario file. It’s also able to run suites of tests which right now are simple scripts.

The next steps are integrating Selenium to perform automatized eBox configuration through a browser (thus testing the GUI too), creating nice GUI tools to generate the scenario files and manage the test suites and writing powerful reporting tools.

Of course, ANSTE is free software under the GPL license and you can follow (or contribute to) the development in ANSTE’s Trac.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Free Software, Warp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.