Out of all the hours I’ve spent writing cruisecontrol, ant, and nant scripts, most of them have been troubleshooting mail tasks.

In attempting to set up cruisecontrol and ant projects for our iPhone application I ran across the following error when trying to send email using gmail:

Could not Connect to smtp host: smtp.gmail.com, port 587

Fixing this was dead easy after scouring the internet. It seems that neither ant or cruisecontrol play well with gmail over 587. Changing the mailport to 465 solved the problem:

I also recently went through the process of installing and configuring subversion for a company.

Here were some of the notable steps

 

References:

• Setting repository permissions for SELinux:
  
  • http://subversion.tigris.org/faq.html#reposperms
    
• Main reference for Subversion setup
  
  • http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/ch06s04.html
    

 

Steps:

INTSTALLING AND MAKING SUBVERSION AVAILABLE

1. Install subversion:
   

• yum install subversion
  

 

1. Install subversion mod_dav_svn plugin for apache 2.0 integration:
   

• yum install mod_dav_svn
  

 

1. Update the httpd.conf to load the mod_dav_svn.so module before any other subversion tasks. Add the following lines to /etc/httpd/conf.d/subversion.conf
   

   LoadModule dav_module         modules/mod_dav.so
   

   LoadModule dav_svn_module     modules/mod_dav_svn.so
   

   * If the firewall has www turned off on machine, you must enable this.  For example, in fedora, this can be done via: 
   

           System-Security Settings and Firewall -> Add www to allowed
   

 

CREATING THE REPOSITORY

The following steps all happen on the server.

1. Make the svn repository

• mkdir -p /home/repos/svn/vrepos
  

• svnadmin create /home/repos/svn/vrepos
  

• cchown –R apache.apache /home/repos/svn
  

    * Note for SELinux / Fedora Core 3+ / Red Hat Enterprise users: 

In addition to regular Unix permissions, under SELinux every file, directory, process, etc. has a ‘security context’. When a process attempts to access a file, besides checking the Unix permissions the system also checks to see if the security context of the process is compatible with the security context of the file.

Assuming your linux box has SELinux enabled, to run Subversion under Apache, you have to set the security context of the repository to allow Apache access (or turn off the restrictions on Apache, if you think all this is overkill). The chcon command is used to set the security context of files (similarly to how the chmod sets the traditional Unix permissions). For example, one user had to issue this command

– chcon -R -h -t httpd_sys_content_t /home/repos/svn

2. Set up a directory to import

– mkdir /home/repos/tmpsvn/vrepos

– cd /home/repos/tmpsvn/vrepos

- mkdir branches

- mkdir tags

- mkdir trunk

- mkdir trunk/ThirdParty

- mkdir trunk/Build – add build scripts to this folder

- mkdir trunk/Source – add Stargate and EcoTool folders to this

1. Add info to httpd configuration so that apache can serve repository and it will be password protected:
   

 

<Location /vrepos>

    DAV svn

    SVNPath /home/repos/svn/vrepos

    SSLRequireSSL

    AuthType Basic

    AuthName "Subversion repository"

    AuthUserFile /home/repos/svn/svn-auth-file

    Require valid-user

</Location>

1. Add the users to the password file:
   

   1. For each user:
      

   $$ ### First time: use -c to create the file
   

   $ ### Use -m to use MD5 encryption of the password, which is more secure
   

   $ htpasswd -cm /home/repos/svn/svn-auth-file davidq
   

   New password: ***** 
   

   Re-type new password: *****
   

   $ htpasswd -m /home/repos/svn/svn-auth-file rossa
   

   New password: *******
   

   Re-type new password: *******
   

   Adding password for user rossa
   

 

 

1. Configure Putty to go against repository: https://surveyor.verdiem.com/vrepos
   

 

       
 

This is how the repository will look on the 

 

 

I just went through the process of installing testlink for internal test case management, so I thought my experiences were worth a blog post.

Testlink 1.7 is an online testcase management system. It allows you to manage the testing cycle by managing test plans, test cases, test execution results.

Test link is integrated with a php database and is easily installed on a lamp stack.

 

Great instructions and information on installing and managing testlink can be found in the following links or at the test link website. The details in these documents goes far beyond the details in this doc. I’ll just outline some of the specific settings I used when configuring testlink

 

Test link website: http://www.teamst.org/

 

Installation:

1. Install background services

* You need to make sure that the required services are installed on the machine. Mainly apache, mysql, php. Additionally, you need to install the php_mysql adapter. I needed to install this. In order to do so I actually re-compiled the php code this time including the mysql adapter. I recently found out that I could have just installed the mysql_php adapter using yum unlike what I had originally thought.

 

2. Tranfer the testlink installation zip and uncompress files into /home/repos/testlink

* The testlink zip file can be found on their website or at:

 

3. Point apache at the install directory by adding /etc/httpd/conf.d/testlinnk.conf with the following contents:

 

 

3. Change the owner of /home/repos/testlink to apache apache

– chmod apache.apache /home/repos/testlink

 

4. I never could actually get the security configurations correct with SELinux so that apache would actually serve the page. So I ….. disabled SELinux

– $ Echo 0>/selinux/enforce

To re-enable you’d add the following:

– $ Echo 1>/selinux/enforce

I also believe that when the machine is rebooted, seLinux may be re-enabled so testlink might just stop working.

 

5. Generate database tables and add data (create default or transfer from previous db)

– Go to http://localhost/testlink and login with admin admin (default which should be changed.)

– Follow the installation defeaults.

– All should go swimmingly and you’ve got a testlink instance up and running

– At this point you should be ready to add test plans, projects, test runs, users yada yada yada

 

JIRA integration

• Note – as good as I think testlink is, it’s a bit week in it’s integration with bug tracking system. It essentially allows you to launch jira within testlink to create a bug, and then manually add the bug id to a test result.
  
• Test results show the bugs attached to them and these bugs can be launched from within testlink (which is kinda nice). Also, when a bug is resolved, it shows up as struck out within the test execution record.
  

1. Edit /home/repos/testlink/testlink_170/custom_config.inc.php file to specify that it is integrating with JIRA for bug tracking.
   

 

 

 

1. Edit /home/repos/testlink/testlink_170/cfg/jira.cfg.php to point at the jira instance (database, database user, etc).
   

 

 

Restart httpd and you’re good to go.