jacalvo's blog

ANSTE 0.7 released!

jacalvo — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 13:03:17 +0000

After seven months of the 0.6 release, ANSTE 0.7 is finally out. The project has been a bit abandoned because I have been very busy working on eBox.

Some of the new features were implemented time ago, but I was waiting for a big one for the new release, and precisely my work at eBox Technologies has brought me the opportunity to do it. We are adding multi-gateway support to eBox with DHCP and PPPoE interfaces (currently it only supported it with static ones).

With this feature implemented eBox will take a big step forward to become the reference in the open source small business server market.

Now ANSTE is capable of easily simulate DHCP and PPPoE routers, this way we can automatize all the testing of the new features.

Here is the complete list of new features and fixes:

Added new router types with dhcp and pppoe
Added user-extensions and single-window settings for Selenium
Now -wait-fail option gives the opportunity of retry a test
Added new protocol and firefox-profile settings for Selenium
Added precondition attributes (var and eq) to test elements
Added element to include and only if
condition is satisfied
Bugfix: use flock for allowing only one instance of anste
Added name of the user that executed ANSTE on the HTML report
Bugfix: missing HTML report generation time
Added scripts executed to the test results

You can get the anste package from the usual repository:

deb http://people.warp.es/~josh/debian ./

Happy 4th anniversary eBox!

jacalvo — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:25:04 +0000

As you can read in the official press note, today is the 4th anniversary of eBox Platform as a open source project. What a coincidence, just two days ago was my first year anniversary as an employee at eBox Technologies, the company that supports the eBox development and offers all the professional services related to it.

The experience of an entire year working with the rest of the eBox team has been very positive. In this last year eBox has improved a lot and I’m very proud of being part of it. In fact, I started to work with part of the current eBox team during the spring of 2007, while I was doing developing ANSTE project, specially designed for the automatization of the integration tests of eBox Platform. But now, with a company fully backing eBox development, I believe it is our opportunity to make eBox the best Linux Small Business Server and the first viable open source alternative to Windows SBS.

I don’t want to finish this post without giving thanks to all the people that has contributed to eBox or used it during these four years. This has been a great year but I’m sure the next ones will be even better. And don’t forget to stay tuned for the 1.4 release that will be out just in a couple of months from now!

First experience with Windows Server

jacalvo — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:20:38 +0000

I’ve been using Windows for years in the desktop (from 3.1 to Vista). Of course I prefer Linux, but it’s true that sometimes Windows have some advantages over it in a few points (Linux has many others ).

Today, I had my first experience with Windows as a server (Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition). I wanted it to serve as Domain Controller. Well, it’s not difficult, but it’s really painful. You spend several minutes clicking “next” buttons on a few wizards, watching progress bars, choosing lots of options… And finally, when it’s ready, you try to add a new user to the domain and after 10 tries you get tired because all passwords are rejected due to “insecurity”.

I spent a couple of minutes trying to find where to edit the password policy with no luck.

You’ll probably say that I have no idea about Windows. Yes, it’s true. But if you have used eBox you already know that you can deploy a Domain Controller in less than two minutes, just accessing the web interface and enabling the proper module (one click), and then you press the “save changes” button and you are ready to add users from the “Add User” menu in the same interface (intuitive, isn’t it?) and changing the password policy settings (new feature on eBox 1.2) is also immediate.

Is Windows Active Directory more powerful? Yes, that is probably true. However, let’s think about a typical small or medium bussiness, do you think they use all windows server “advanced features”? I don’t think so, and remember that eBox is constantly evolving.

I think that free software wins once again. But that’s only my opinion. Is it yours too?

ANSTE presented at MySQL conference

jacalvo — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 12:45:33 +0000

Yesterday, Jorge Bernal from eBox technologies and Víctor Jiménez from Warp Networks did a presentation called Testing the Cluster with ANSTE.

Sadly, I couldn’t be there but I’m sure it was very interesting. At least we can see the slides here.

Altough ANSTE was created for testing eBox, this is a example of how it can be useful for many other projects.

ANSTE 0.6 released

jacalvo — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 11:54:47 +0000

In 2007, my workmate Isaac wrote a post about ANSTE. That was for sure the first reference of it on the Internet. A few days ago ANSTE appeared on the FLOSS Weekly #62 with Isaac and Javier as special guests talking about eBox. It was a very interesting and funny program and I’m happy seeing that my project has appeared on a so important podcast.

Now, I’m proud to announce that ANSTE has reached the 0.6 version, that comes with some minor improvements that will make the life of the test developer easier.

You can get the anste package from the following repository:
deb http://people.warp.es/~josh/debian ./

Happy testing!