I have learned the hard way to never trust anything I write until I've
run tests on it... The worst part is that I keep having to relearn it.
The hard way...
These days, I try to write the tests with the code, pounding on the edge
cases, /first/.
Part of the reason that I'm coding diagnostic packet decoding (for
configuration negotiation, for example) is to eventually put together
some 'fuzz' tests. Assuming I break something, it should enable me to
more quickly understand why something blew up. That's the hope,
anyway. If nothing else, I've gained a better understanding of DAP.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 5/25/23 12:39 PM, Rob Jarratt wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Koning<paulkoning(a)comcast.net>
Sent: 24 May 2023 19:36
To: The Hobbyist DECnet mailing list<hecnet(a)lists.dfupdate.se>
Subject: [HECnet] Re: DECnet Regression Tests?
On May 24, 2023, at 2:15 PM, Paul
Koning<paulkoning(a)comcast.net>
wrote:
>
>
>> On May 19, 2023, at 8:23 PM, Johnny Billquist<bqt(a)softjar.se> wrote:
>>
>> There are some test scripts and tools in the RSX DECnet sources, but
they
are really RSX specific, and for testing RSX
against different types of
systems.
>
I've never used them, and I don't know what would be required for them
to
even be usable.
> Apart from those, I don't think I've
seen anything.
> But there is something for RSX, which might be answering parts of your
question, but it's nothing general.
PyDECnet comes with a large body of unit tests.
And that suggests an interesting notion. Many of those tests are of the
form:
1. Construct a test packet
2. Submit that test packet to the system being tested (PyDECnet) 3. If a
response is expected, check that it arrives and contains what we expect 4.
Check the resulting sytem state
Those could, in many cases, be adapted to do "black box" testing of other
DECnet implementations. The key difference is that as written the tests
typically poke at a single protocol layer, and check state by looking into
the
internals of the layer. A black box test would
have to wrap the test
packets in
the necessary lower layer envelopes to get them
to the destination, and
the
state checks would be limited to what is visible
via the management
interface
(counters and state) or other application APIs.
Those would not be terribly difficult things to do. For example, PyDECnet
already contains lower layer envelope descriptions, so to take, say, an
NSP
test packet and wrap it in routing and datalink
layer envelopes is not
hard to
do, nor is unwrapping the reply.
One part of my PyDECnet tests is random packet tests, where I construct
random crud to send to a layer to verify that it doesn't die. Obviously
random packets don't do anything useful, and typically would just get
discarded, but it's well known that such abuse tests often break code that
isn't sufficiently paranoid. It would be entertaining to subject other
DECnets
to such abuse.
I usually write a lot of
automated tests, but for my own user mode router I
didn't do that, which makes me feel very bad. It would be interesting to
subject my router to a fuzz test to see how it copes
.
paul
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