Handling hardware resources when testing with Jenkins - python

I want to setup Jenkins to
1) pull our source code from our repository,
2) compile and build it
3) run the tests on an embedded device
step 1 & 2 are quite easy and straight forward with Jenkins
as for step 3,
we have hundreds of those devices in various versions of them, and I'm looking for a utility (preferable in python) that can handle the availability of hardware devices/resources.
in such manner that one of the steps will be able to receive which of the device is available and run the tests on it.

What I have found, is that the best thing to do, is have something like jenkins, or if you're using enterprise, electric commander, manage a resource 'pool' the pool is essentially virtual devices, but they have a property, such that you can call into a python script w/ either an ip-address or serial port and communicate w/ your devices.
I used it for automated embedded testing on radios. The python script managed a whole host of tests, and commander would go ahead and choose a single-step resource from the pool, that resource had an ip, and would pass it into the python script. test would then perform all the tests and the stdout would get stored up into commander/jenkins ... Also set properties to track pass/fail count as test was executing
//main resource gets single step item from pool, in the main resource wrote a tiny script that asked if the item pulled from the pool had the resource name == "Bench1" .. "BenchX" etc.
basically:
if resource.name=="BENCH1":
python myscript.py --com COM3 --baud 9600
...
etc.
the really great feature about doing it this way, is if you have to disconnect a device, you don't need to deliver up script changes, you simply mark the commander/jenkins resource as disabled, and the main 'project' can still pull from what remains in your resource pool

Related

Python compiler call another python compiler to execute a script (execute a script from one independent machine to another)

I know the question title is weird!.
I have two virtual machines. First one has limited resources, while the second one has enough resources just like normal machine. The first machine will receive a signal from an external device. This signal will trigger a python compiler to execute a script. The script is big and the first machine does not have enough resources to execute it.
I can copy the script to the second machine to run it there, but I can't make the second machine receive the external signal. I am wondering if there is a way to make the compiler on the first machine ( once the external signal received) call the compiler on the second machine, so the compiler on the second machine executes the script? so the second compiler should use the second machine resources. check the attached image please.
Assume that the connection is established between the two machines and they can see each other, and the second machine has a copy from the script. I just need the commands that pass ( the execution ) to the second machine and make it use its own resources.
You should look into the microservice architecture to do this.
You can achieve this either by using flask and sending server requests between each machine, or something like nameko, which will allow you to create a "bridge" between machines and call functions between them (seems like what you are more interested in). Example for nameko:
Machine 2 (executor of resource-intensive script):
from nameko.rpc import rpc
class Stuff(object):
#rpc
def example(self):
return "Function running on Machine 2."
You would run the above script through the Nameko shell, as detailed in the docs.
Machine 1:
from nameko.standalone.rpc import ClusterRpcProxy
# This is the amqp server that machine 2 would be running.
config = {
'AMQP_URI': AMQP_URI # e.g. "pyamqp://guest:guest#localhost"
}
with ClusterRpcProxy(config) as cluster_rpc:
cluster_rpc.Stuff.example() # Function running on Machine 2.
More info here.
Hmm, there's many approaches to this problem.
If you want a python only solution, you can check out
dispy http://dispy.sourceforge.net/
Or Dask. https://dask.org/
If you want a robust solution (what I use on my home computing cluster but imo overkill for your problem) you can use
SLURM. SLURM is basically a way to string multiple computers together into a "supercomputer". https://slurm.schedmd.com/documentation.html
For a semi-quick, hacky solution. You can write a microservice. Essentially, your "weak" computer will receive the message then send a http request to your "strong" computer. Your strong computer will contain the actual program, compute results, and pass back the result to your "weak" computer.
Flask is an easy and lightweight solution for this.
All of these solutions require some type of networking. At the least, the computers need to be on the same LAN or both have access over the web.
There are many other approaches not mentioned. For example, you can export a NFS (netowrk file storage) and have one computer put a file in the shared folder and the other computer perform work on the file. I'm sure there are plenty other contrived ways to accomplish this task :). I'd be happy to expand on a particular method if you want.

Python socket program with shell script?

I have two machines connected by a switch. I have a popular server application which we can call "SXC_SERVER" on machine A and I interrogate the "SXC_SERVER" with the corresponding application from machine B, which I'll call "SXC_CLIENT". What I am trying to do is two-fold:
firstly, gain the traffic flow of SXC_SERVER and SXC_CLIENT interaction through tcpdump. The interaction between the two is a simple GET and RESPONSE, but I require the traffic traces.
secondly, I am wanting to log the Resident Set Size (RSS) usage of the SXC_SERVER process during each interaction/iteration
Moreover, I don't just need one traffic trace of the communication and one memory usage log of the SXC_SERVER process otherwise I wouldn't be writing this because I could go away and do that in ten minutes... In fact I am aiming to do very many! But let's say here for simplicity I want to do 10.
Since this will be very labor intensive as it will require me to be at both machines stopping and starting all of the SCX_CLIENT-to-SXC_SERVER interrogation, the tcpdump traffic capture, and the RSS memory usage of SXC_SERVER logging I want to write an automation script.
But! I am not a programmer, or software guy...(darn)
However, that said I can imaging a separate client/server program that oversees this automation, which we can call AUTO_SERVER and AUTO_CLIENT. My thoughts are that machine B would run AUTO_CLIENT and machine A would run AUTO_SERVER. The aim of both are to facilitate the automation, i.e. the stopping and starting of the tcpdump, and the memory logging on machine A of SXC_SERVER process before machine B queries SXC_SERVER with SXC_CLIENT (if you follow me!).
Effectively after one run of the SXC_SERVER-to-SXC_CLIENT GET/RESPONSE interaction I'll end up with:
one traffic capture *.pcap file called n1.pcap
and one memory log dump (of the RSS associated to the process) called n1.csv.
I am not a programmer or software guy but I can see a rough method (to the best of my ability) to achieve this, as follows:
Machine A: AUTO_SERVER
BEGIN:
msgRecieved = open socket(listen on port *n*)
DO
1. wait for machine A to tell me when to start watch (as in the program) to log RSS memory usage of the SXC_SERVER process using hardcoded command:
watch -n 0.1 'ps -p $(pgrep -d"," -x snmpd) -o rss= | awk '\''{ i += $1 } END { print i }'\'' >> ~/Desktop/mem_logs/mem_i.csv
UNTIL (messageRecieved == "FINISH")
quit
END.
Machine B: AUTO_CLIENT
BEGIN:
open socket(new)
for i in 10, do
1. locally start tcpdump with hardcoded hardcoded tcpdump command with relevant filter to only capture the SXC_SERVER-to-SXC_CLIENT traffic and set output flag to capture all traffic to a PCAP file called n*i*.pcap where *i* is the integer of the current for loop, saving the file in folder "~/Desktop/test_captures/".
2. Send the GET request to SXC_SERVER
3. wait for RESPONSE reply from SXC_SERVER
4. after recieved reply tell machine B to stop watch command
i++
5. send string "FINISH" to machine A.
END.
As you can see I would assume that this would be achieved by the use of a separate, and small client/server-like program (which here I've called AUTO_SERVER and AUTO_CLIENT) on both machines. The really rought pseudo-code design should be self-explanatory.
I have found a small client/server socket program located here: http://www.velvetcache.org/2010/06/14/python-unix-sockets which I would think may be suitable if I edit it, but I am not sure how exactly I can feasibly achieve this. Which is where you may be able to provide some assistance.
Can Python to do this automating?
Can it be done with a single bash script?
Do you think I am on the right path with this?
Or have you any helpful suggestions?
Regards.
You can use Python for this kind of thing, but I would strongly recommend using SSH for the bulk of the work (rather than coding the connection stuff yourself), and then using either a bash script or Python script to launch the tcpdump etc. processes.
Your question, however, is a bit too open-ended for stackoverflow - it sounds like you are asking someone to write this program for you, rather than for help with a specific problem.

Starting and stopping processes in a cluster

I'm writing software that runs a bunch of different programs (via twisted's twistd); that is N daemons of various kinds must be started across multiple machines. If I did this manually, I would be running commands like twistd foo_worker, twistd bar_worker and so on on the machines involved.
Basically there will be a list of machines, and the daemon(s) I need them to run. Additionally, I need to shut them all down when the need arises.
If I were to program this from scratch, I would write a "spawner" daemon that would run permanently on each machine in the cluster with the following features accessible through the network for an authenticated administrator client:
Start a process with a given command line. Return a handle to manage it.
Kill a process given a handle.
Optionally, query stuff like cpu time given a handle.
It would be fairly trivial to program the above, but I cannot imagine this is a new problem. Surely there are existing solutions to doing exactly this? I do however lack experience with server administration, and don't even know what the related terms are.
What existing ways are there to do this on a linux cluster, and what are some of the important terms involved? Python specific solutions are welcome, but not necessary.
Another way to put it: Given a bunch of machines in a lan, how do I programmatically work with them as a cluster?
The most familiar and universal way is just to use ssh. To automate you could use fabric.
To start foo_worker on all hosts:
$ fab all_hosts start:foo_worker
To stop bar_worker on a particular list of hosts:
$ fab -H host1,host2 stop:bar_worker
Here's an example fabfile.py:
from fabric.api import env, run, hide # pip install fabric
def all_hosts():
env.hosts = ['host1', 'host2', 'host3']
def start(daemon):
run("twistd --pid %s.pid %s" % (daemon, daemon))
def stop(daemon):
run("kill %s" % getpid(daemon))
def getpid(daemon):
with hide('stdout'):
return run("cat %s.pid" % daemon)
def ps(daemon):
"""Get process info for the `daemon`."""
run("ps --pid %s" % getpid(daemon))
There are a number of ways to configure host lists in fabric, with scopes varying from global to per-task, and it’s possible mix and match as needed..
To streamline the process management on a particular host you could write initd scripts for the daemons (and run service daemon_name start/stop/restart) or use supervisord (and run supervisorctl e.g., supervisorctl stop all). To control "what installed where" and to push configuration in a centralized manner something like puppet could be used.
The usual tool is a batch queue system, such as SLURM, SGE, Torque/Moab, LSF, and so on.
Circus :
Documentation :
http://docs.circus.io/en/0.5/index.html
Code:
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/circus/0.5
Summary from the documentation :
Circus is a process & socket manager. It can be used to monitor and control processes and sockets.
Circus can be driven via a command-line interface or programmatically trough its python API.
It shares some of the goals of Supervisord, BluePill and Daemontools. If you are curious about what Circus brings compared to other projects, read Why should I use Circus instead of X ?.
Circus is designed using ZeroMQ http://www.zeromq.org/. See Design for more details.

Android's MonkeyRunner occasionally throws exceptions

I am running an automated test using an Android emulator driving an app with a Monkey script written in Python.
The script is copying files onto the emulator, clicks buttons in the app and reacts depending on the activities that the software triggers during its operation. The script is supposed to be running the cycle a few thousand times so I have this in a loop to run the adb tool to copy the files, start the activities and see how the software is reacting by calling the getProperty method on the device with the parameter 'am.current.comp.class'.
So here is a very simplified version of my script:
for target in targets:
androidSDK.copyFile(emulatorName, target, '/mnt/sdcard')
# Runs the component
device.startActivity(component='com.myPackage/com.myPackage.myactivity')
while 1:
if device.getProperty('am.current.comp.class') == 'com.myPackage.anotheractivity':
time.sleep(1) # to allow the scree to display the new activity before I click on it
device.touch(100, 100, 'DOWN_AND_UP')
# Log the result of the operation somewhere
break
time.sleep(0.1)
(androidSDK is a small class I've written that wraps some utility functions to copy and delete files using the adb tool).
On occasions the script crashes with one of a number of exceptions, for instance (I am leaving out the full stack trace)
[com.android.chimpchat.adb.AdbChimpDevice]com.android.ddmlib.ShellCommandUnresponsiveException
or
[com.android.chimpchat.adb.AdbChimpDevice] Unable to get variable: am.current.comp.class
[com.android.chimpchat.adb.AdbChimpDevice]java.net.SocketException: Software caused connectionabort: socket write error
I have read that sometimes the socket connection to the device becomes unstable and may need a restart (adb start-server and adb kill-server come in useful).
The problem I'm having is that the tools are throwing Java exceptions (Monkey runs in Jython), but I am not sure how those can be trapped from within my Python script. I would like to be able to determine the exact cause of the failure inside the script and recover the situation so I can carry on with my iterations (re-establish the connection, for instance? Would for instance re-initialising my device with another call to MonkeyRunner.waitForConnection be enough?).
Any ideas?
Many thanks,
Alberto
EDIT. I thought I'd mention that I have discovered that it is possible to catch Java-specific exceptions in a Jython script, should anyone need this:
from java.net import SocketException
...
try:
...
except(SocketException):
...
It is possible to catch Java-specific exceptions in a Jython script:
from java.net import SocketException
...
try:
...
except(SocketException):
...
(Taken from OP's edit to his question)
This worked for me:
device.shell('exit')# Exit the shell

Execute arbitrary python code remotely - can it be done?

I'm working on a grid system which has a number of very powerful computers. These can be used to execute python functions very quickly. My users have a number of python functions which take a long time to calculate on workstations, ideally they would like to be able to call some functions on a remote powerful server, but have it appear to be running locally.
Python has an old function called "apply" - it's mostly useless these days now that python supports the extended-call syntax (e.g. **arguments), however I need to implement something that works a bit like this:
rapply = Rapply( server_hostname ) # Set up a connection
result = rapply( fn, args, kwargs ) # Remotely call the function
assert result == fn( *args, **kwargs ) #Just as a test, verify that it has the expected value.
Rapply should be a class which can be used to remotely execute some arbitrary code (fn could be literally anything) on a remote server. It will send back the result which the rapply function will return. The "result" should have the same value as if I had called the function locally.
Now let's suppose that fn is a user-provided function I need some way of sending it over the wire to the execution server. If I could guarantee that fn was always something simple it could could just be a string containing python source code... but what if it were not so simple?
What if fn might have local dependencies: It could be a simple function which uses a class defined in a different module, is there a way of encapsulating fn and everything that fn requires which is not standard-library? An ideal solution would not require the users of this system to have much knowledge about python development. They simply want to write their function and call it.
Just to clarify, I'm not interested in discussing what kind of network protocol might be used to implement the communication between the client & server. My problem is how to encapsulate a function and its dependencies as a single object which can be serialized and remotely executed.
I'm also not interested in the security implications of running arbitrary code on remote servers - let's just say that this system is intended purely for research and it is within a heavily firewalled environment.
Take a look at PyRO (Python Remote objects) It has the ability to set up services on all the computers in your cluster, and invoke them directly, or indirectly through a name server and a publish-subscribe mechanism.
It sounds like you want to do the following.
Define a shared filesystem space.
Put ALL your python source in this shared filesystem space.
Define simple agents or servers that will "execfile" a block of code.
Your client then contacts the agent (REST protocol with POST methods works well for
this) with the block of code.
The agent saves the block of code and does an execfile on that block of code.
Since all agents share a common filesystem, they all have the same Python library structure.
We do with with a simple WSGI application we call "batch server". We have RESTful protocol for creating and checking on remote requests.
Stackless had ability to pickle and unpickle running code. Unfortunately current implementation doesn't support this feature.
You could use a ready-made clustering solution like Parallel Python. You can relatively easily set up multiple remote slaves and run arbitrary code on them.
You could use a SSH connection to the remote PC and run the commands on the other machine directly. You could even copy the python code to the machine and execute it.
Syntax:
cat ./test.py | sshpass -p 'password' ssh user#remote-ip "python - script-arguments-if-any for test.py script"
1) here "test.py" is the local python script.
2) sshpass used to pass the ssh password to ssh connection

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