In this post I would like to show how to increase file system space on installed Fedora VMWare instance. You might need it if you use VMWare (and we know many people do) to spin VMs for Selenium testing.

In this particular case I use I installed Fedora and allocated 10GB but later I started using this VM for quite large databases and free space quickly disappeared.

# df -k
Filesystem                    1K-blocks    Used Available Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs                         498132       0    498132   0% /dev
tmpfs                            508060       0    508060   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                            508060     772    507288   1% /run
/dev/mapper/vg_fedora-lv_root   7641992 6590912    656228  91% /
tmpfs                            508060       0    508060   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs                            508060       0    508060   0% /media
/dev/sda1                        487652   84379    377673  19% /boot

# fdisk -l
 
Disk /dev/sda: 10.7 GB, 10737418240 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1305 cylinders, total 20971520 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000e3a8c
 
   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048     1026047      512000   83  Linux
/dev/sda2         1026048    20971519     9972736   8e  Linux LVM
 
 
Disk /dev/mapper/vg_fedora-lv_swap: 2113 MB, 2113929216 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 257 cylinders, total 4128768 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
 
 
Disk /dev/mapper/vg_fedora-lv_root: 8086 MB, 8086618112 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 983 cylinders, total 15794176 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

To grow disk space I went to VMWare console and added one more disk as shown below:
 
 

 
 
Now we can see a new disk in “fdisk -l” command output.

Disk /dev/sdb: 21.5 GB, 21474836480 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2610 cylinders, total 41943040 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

Now we create partition sdb1 covering all new disk using “fdisk /dev/sdb”.

Command (m for help): n
Partition type:
   p   primary (0 primary, 0 extended, 4 free)
   e   extended
Select (default p):
Using default response p
Partition number (1-4, default 1):
Using default value 1
First sector (2048-41943039, default 2048):
Using default value 2048
Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G} (2048-41943039, default 41943039):
Using default value 41943039
Partition 1 of type Linux and of size 20 GiB is set
 
Command (m for help): v
Remaining 2047 unallocated 512-byte sectors
 
Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered!

Finally we just expand our volume group and file system:

pvcreate /dev/sdb1
vgextend vg_fedora /dev/sdb1
lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/mapper/vg_fedora-lv_root
resize2fs /dev/mapper/vg_fedora-lv_root

We recently launched functional monitoring support in Nerrvana and we think it will be interesting for our readers to learn why Yandex (taking fourth place behind Google, China’s Baidu and Yahoo, according to ComScore) uses functional monitoring.

Post is translated with Mikhail Levin’s permission and its original (in Russian) is located on Habrahabr. Yandex also shared technical details of their system at Yet Another Conference 2012 – video and slides are available here (but also in Russian).

Here is it:

“Do you monitor your services in production? Whose responsibility it is in your company?

When we think of monitoring; server side developers, system administrators and DBAs often come to mind. They must watch the data processing queues and free disk space for the availability of individual hosts and their load.

Such monitoring really gives a lot of information about the service, but does not always show how the service works for an end user. Therefore, in addition to system monitoring, we, at Yandex, have created a functional monitoring system, tracking the state of the service from final interfaces – through the way the app looks and works in a browser, or how it works at the API level.

What is functionality monitoring in our understanding? To understand this better, let’s look at how things progressed for us. Read the rest of this entry »

Nerrvana now supports – PHP 5.4.1 (with PHPUnit 3.6.10), Java 1.7.0, Python 2.7.3 (with nose 1.1.2, Selenium 1.0.3), Perl 5.14.2 and Ruby 1.9.3p194.

Selenium was updated to 2.29.0. We added support for Firefox 18, Chrome 24, Opera 12.14 on Windows XP and Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 7 only.

Here you can see a full list of platforms supported today by Nerrvana.

We are glad to inform our clients about Windows 7 Selenium testing support in Nerrvana. A full list of available platforms is shown below (Nerrvana UI screenshot):

Our plans – we moved from CentOS to Fedora which will allow us to expand a list of browsers on Linux. Adding support for launching Selenium tests written in Python and Ruby. Windows 8 is next.

Testing the application with two database types – configuration files ‘as is’ – future plans

Part 1 – Using Nerrvana – our setup
Part 2 – Using Nerrvana – SVN hooks to Jenkins
Part 3 – Using Nerrvana – deployment & Jenkins (part 1)
Part 4 – Using Nerrvana – deployment & Jenkins (part 2)
Part 5 – Using Nerrvana – Jenkins setup for Selenium testing
Part 6 – Using Nerrvana – final notes – this post

At this point, we’ve talked about how we test our application with Jenkins and Nerrvana. In our recount, some details have been omitted in order not to complicate the essence of the process.

It’s now time to show the real configuration files.
Read the rest of this entry »

Creating the Nerrvana plugin configurationfile – walking through it – runningour tests – checking test results

Part 1 – Using Nerrvana – our setup
Part 2 – Using Nerrvana – SVN hooks to Jenkins
Part 3 – Using Nerrvana – deployment & Jenkins (part 1)
Part 4 – Using Nerrvana – deployment & Jenkins (part 2)
Part 5 – Using Nerrvana – Jenkins setup for Selenium testing – this post

In the previous post, we have automated our web application deployment process and are now ready to continue improving our build and include Selenium testing into it. At this point Jenkins is able to react to the commit, prepare and install our application on the deployment host. We also learned how to extract commit information from SVN, parse and save it to version.txt file.

Today we will launch Selenium tests in Nerrvana with our Jenkins plugin. The Nerrvana plugin is available at http://your_jenkins_instance/pluginManager/available. The plugin uses LFTP to synchronize tests between Jenkins and Nerrvana. So, please install it (yum install lftp) on the same server running Jenkins. Read the rest of this entry »

We are glad to introduce the Selenium IDE formatter for Nerrvana.

What is Nerrvana? Nerrvana is a cloud service which allows you to run functional and cross browser Selenium tests on demand.

We hope it will help those who use the Selenium IDE to create and run tests or monitoring scripts in our cloud, and help you to transition from recording tests in the IDE to writing much more powerful and easy to maintain tests in Java.

Use 720p for the best quality

If there will be a demand from our clients we will extend the framework to create reports in the same format for tests generated by the Nerrvana Selenium IDE formatter.

Even though Selenium IDE tests have some limits it won’t compromise the quality of the reports you see and will minimise the time you spend to analyse them.

So please register your free account and give it a try.

We are glad to release Jenkins plugin for Nerrvana. We are using final version for a couple of months now and completely happy with it. Please visit documentation page for details.

In the next article here we will share how do we use Nerrvana Jenkins plugin. Stay tuned!

What is next?

Selenium IDE formatter for Nerrvana. Yes, it will allow you to export Selenium IDE tests in a format and structure which is fully launchable in Nerrvana as is.

Jenkins job creation – our webapplication deployment in details – deploymentfor Selenium testing completed

Part 1 – Using Nerrvana – our setup
Part 2 – Using Nerrvana – SVN hooks to Jenkins
Part 3 – Using Nerrvana – deployment & Jenkins (part 1)
Part 4 – Using Nerrvana – deployment & Jenkins (part 2) – this post

In the previous post we have finished configuring Jenkins and now we can create a Jenkins job to test our application.

Open the page http://your_jenkins_host/view/All/newJob and type in the job name. Since our application is Answers, we use it as our job name.

In practice, it is convenient to add branch information to your job name. For example, job ‘Answers TRUNK’ tests TRUNK, job ‘Answers Release 1.4′ tests Release 1.4.

Down in the section “Advanced Project Options” press the button “Advanced …” and set “Quiet period” to 0 seconds. We know that many people do builds a few times a day. In this case, you will configure this option differently. We build for each commit, and therefore we do not need to wait for 5 seconds. Jenkins help for this step describes the practical cases, when this option is required. Read the rest of this entry »

This post continues our two recent posts where we explained how to install Xen and minimise Windows 7 to make it ready for Selenium testing. We cut out as many components and services as possible, because we are going to only use browsers.

As we have Xen installed and the Windows 7 install image – today, we will complete our story and show you how to install Windows 7 on Xen. This same process can be used to install standard Windows 7 but you will need to allocate more space (file or logical volume) and more RAM.

In our Xen installation post we already created a logical volume …

#lvcreate –size 7G –name win7 vg0

… launched a VNC server, connected to CentOS with VNC Viewer, launched Virtual Machine Manager and, finally, pressed the ‘New’ button.

From this point forward everything is very simple.
Read the rest of this entry »