How To Do Things
================

Tricks
------

This section is a compendium of a various useful tricks for debugging,
configuring and generally getting the most out of Megatest.

Limiting your running jobs
--------------------------

The following example will limit a test in the jobgroup "group1" to no more than 10 tests simultaneously.

In your testconfig:

----------------
[test_meta]
jobgroup group1
----------------

In your megatest.config:

---------------
[jobgroups]
group1 10
custdes 4
---------------




Debugging Tricks
----------------

Examining The Environment
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

During Config File Processing
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

It is often helpful to know the content of variables in various
contexts as Megatest does the actions needed to run your tests. A handy technique is to force the startup of an xterm in the context being examined.

For example, if an item list is not being generated as expected you
can inject the startup of an xterm as if it were an item:

.Original items table
-----------------
[items]
CELLNAME [system getcellname.sh]
-----------------

.Items table modified for debug
-----------------
[items]
DEBUG [system xterm]
CELLNAME [system getcellnames.sh]
-----------------

When this test is run an xterm will pop up. In that xterm the
environment is exactly that in which the script "getcellnames.sh"
would run. You can now debug the script to find out why it isn't
working as expected.

Organising Your Tests and Tasks
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The default location "tests" for storing tests can be extended by
adding to your tests-paths section.

----------------------------
[misc]
parent #{shell dirname $(readlink -f .)}

[tests-paths]
1 #{get misc parent}/simplerun/tests
----------------------------

The above example shows how you can use addition sections in your
config file to do complex processing. By putting results of relatively
slow operations into variables the processing of your configs can be
kept fast.

Alternative Method for Running your Job Script
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

.Directly running job in testconfig
-------------------
[setup]
runscript main.csh
-------------------

The runscript method is essentially a brute force way to run scripts where the
user is responsible for setting STATE and STATUS and managing the details of running a test. 

Debugging Server Problems
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Some handy Unix commands to track down issues with servers not
communicating with your test manager processes. Please put in tickets
at https://www.kiatoa.com/fossils/megatest if you have problems with
servers getting stuck.

----------------
sudo lsof -i
sudo netstat -lptu
sudo netstat -tulpn
----------------