Re: [KVM_AUTOTEST] unattended installs take 2

Michael Goldish
2009-06-22T06:20:57Z

----- "Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues" <lmr@redhat.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 17:50 -0400, David Huff wrote:
> > Second pass at the unattended install test. Both Linux and Windows
> guests are
> > working however currently it just uses the existing boot test and
> extends
> > timeouts. We still need a good way of determining if an unattended
> install
> > completed without error. For Linux guest we should be able to run
> something
> > similar to a regular boot test, after reboot try to ssh in. For
> windows guest
> > we still have to run setup in order to have shh up.
> >
> > Requires the processor patch as well as the patch to "strip and
> split" patches.
> >
> > Scripts still uses loop back mounts for now we can upgrade this in
> the future
> > however most generic way of creating and manipulating disk images.
> >
> > 5 patches in this set
> > 0005-Modified-boot-test-in-kvm_test.py.patch
> > 0004-Added-two-sample-unattended-config-files-Fedora-and.patch
> > 0003-added-unattended.sh-script.patch
> > 0002-modified-config-file-to-run-unattended-install.patch
> > 0001-Added-floppy-and-tftp-options-to-qemu-command.patch
>
> I've been trough the changes, thank you for your work David:
> Comments/questions:
>
> * Any particular reason why you guys wrote the PXE boot setup as a
> shell script instead of a python module (that could be also used as a
> stand alone program)?
> * The script had some unused variables, and some extra debugging
> statements would be helpful. I've modified the original script a bit
> and
> I am attaching it to this message, please verify if the changes make
> sense.
>
> Your changes are an excellent starting point for getting unattended
> installs integrated. So things I'd like to explore:
>
> * Turn the script into a python module
> * See whether the development version of cobbler already handles
> windows appropriately. Maybe for now cobbler is not an option, but we
> can revisit it in the future.
> * Create an install test that would take as the parameter the type
> of installation we want to perform (steps/unattended).

I don't see a very good reason to implement that last item, since:
- we can already easily select tests in the config file with 'only install' or 'only unattended_install' (we can rename 'install' to 'steps_install'), so there's no advantage to adding an additional install type parameter,
- we might want, and probably would want, to run both 'install' and 'unattended_install' in long test sets (weekly or longer ones),
- both install tests are already quite complex -- creating a wrapper for them would make them slightly more complex

What do you think?

Thanks,
Michael