How to install Bash 4.2 on HP-UX PA-Risc (PPA) and Itanium (IA)
How to install Bash 4.2 on HP-UX PPA and IA
As part of our QA Test case automation strategy we are updating all our NIX machines to Bash 4.2. Using Bash across all platforms allows us to maintain a single set of scripts, which is convenient considering the multiple thousands of tests we would like to automate.
This article will:
- Show where you can Download Bash + dependencies from HP
- Walk through an installation using swinstall
How to Update to Bash 4.2 on Solaris 9 or 10 (SPARC)
I had to update our UNIX hosts to Bash 4.2 this week. This allows us to take advantage of the newer BASH features not present in the shipping builds.
This article will:
- Show where you can get Bash 4.2 (binary) + Related dependencies
- Install them on your Sun Solaris 9 (SPARC) machine
Bash 101 Part 3: Platform Detection and Dynamic (Run-time) command execution
Bash gives you the ability to create a generic script which can execute a run-time specified command with run time specified arguments (variable based execution). This is an effective trick which has proven useful in our QA Automation system.
This article aims to:
- Demonstrate platform detection and...
- Show how to execute a command that Differs from platform to platform
Bash 101 Part 2: Concatenation, Capturing command output and Case statements
This is part 2 in a series about Bash. My primary purpose is to document what I've learned over the last week. Today I'm focusing on:
- String concatenation
- Capturing executed command output
- Basic Case statements
Lab Automation with PowerCLI Part 4: Working with Snapshots
Snapshots are easily one of the most important ideas associated with virtual machines. Being able to capture the state of a Machine and revert to a known good state saves time and money every day. VMware exposes the ability to manipulate Snapshots via PowerCLI.
This article aims to cover the following points:
- Create a snapshot
- Edit a snapshot (Name/Description)
- Set a VM to use a Snapshot
- Remove a snapshot
Bash 101: Cross-platform command shell with scripting
While I love powershell, it isn't the best solution for every problem. We were thinking about implementing Powershell automation scripts for our windows hosts, but then decided that maintaining 2 sets of test scripts (*NIX / Windows) would be impractical given the number of scripts we need to write & maintain
We settled on creating just one script per test case. To make that happen we had to turn to Bash.
This article aims to:
- Briefly explain what bash is
- Introduce a couple of basic concepts
PSExec: Nice tool, Difficult to automate if you like StandardOut
While working on a Test-case automation solution I ran across an interesting issue: PSExec can't be used to remotely execute a script and return a result when executed within a C# application with StandardOutput redirection.
Issues:
- Hangs (Have to manually kill PSExec service on remote machine)
- null value return (StandardOutput redirection not supported)
Powershell: Cannot overwrite variable Host because it is read-only or constant
While creating a Powershell script to pull statistic data from ESX hosts I ran into this error message:
Cannot overwrite variable Host because it is read-only or constant.
At line:16 char:8
+ foreach <<<< ($host in $ESXHosts)
+ CategoryInfo : WriteError: (Host:String) [], SessionStateUnauthorizedAccessException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : VariableNotWritable
Apparently $Host is a reserved word / Variable in Powershell. Changing the variable name to $ESXHost solved the problem for me.
Lab Automation with PowerCLI Part 3: Create & Delete Virtual Machines
PowerCLI provides interfaces to create/modify/delete a number of things in your VMWare environment:
- Virtual Machines
- Snapshots
- Virtual Switches
- Hard Disks
- Roles
- Permissions
- etc...
Today we are going to discuss Virtual Machines
Previous Article: Gathering Performance Statistics
Next Article: Working with Snapshots
How to: Install Cygwin and configure SSH
While it is a bit "heavy" (weighing in at 190MB for base + SSH), Cygwin provides an up to date Bash 4.x shell along with an assortment of standard UNIX like utilities. This setup can help simplify the management of heterogeneous (Microsoft/Linux/*NIX) environments.
We have made good use of the SSH Functionality to standardize our QA test scripts across all our supported platforms.
This article aims to:
- Walk through an install of Cygwin 1.7.5 (Base Packages + SSH)
- Configure the Cygwin SSHD