Sysadmin

🕵️ Intro The Linux Test Project is a joint project started years ago by SGI, OSDL and Bull developed and now maintained by IBM, Cisco, Fujitsu, SUSE, Red Hat, Oracle and many others. The project goal is to deliver tests to the open source community that validate the reliability, robustness, and stability of Linux. In these days I’m having a journey on the project so with this article I want to show step by step how to setup the project, how tests are actually written and give you a quick and dirty guide to write your first one. ...

🦀 Intro As an exercise, today we are going to package a game named battleship-rs developed by Orhun Parmaksız. We will also use the power of OpenSUSE build service to do most of the heavy work. Before starting, let’s check out the project: it’s hosted on github and if you want to try it out before packaging, it’s a nice game where two people can play in the terminal over a TCP network connection. The initial ship placement, shot tracking, player turns and game state itself is managed from a single Rust process. ...

Prelude This is a followup from my previous post and a sort of continuation on the series of the topic, where we are exploring ways to make our test system more “unreliable” in order to observe if our applications behave nicely under challenging and not-ideal environments. In this article we are going to explore some linux technologies: Network Namespaces (netns) Virtual Ethernet Devices (veth) Network Emulation (netem) scheduling policy The goal is to setup a virtual network link inside our system, make the two network devices talk each other and then simulate a bad/slow/glitchy/flaky communication to test how applications behave under difficult conditions. ...

“You sound like a broken record” Is something we complain when someone repeats again and again the same concepts. But even broken disks can sometime be useful DISCLAIMER: No filesystem or device were harmed in the making of this experiment 😉 Image credits: Mick Haupt In this article I would like to explore the powerful tools we have in Linux to simulate dealing with broken disks, that is, drives that more or less randomly report errors. Why is this important ? Because by simulating errors that will also happen sooner or later in the real world, we are able to create software that is more robust and can withstand any problems on the infrastructure. ...