[ipxe-devel] PXE testing

[Robin Smidsrød]

On 10.06.2014 20:36, Carl Karsten wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 11:16 AM, Brian Rak <brak at gameservers.com
> <mailto:brak at gameservers.com>> wrote:
> 
>     There's http://ipxe.org/dev/driver but that is not a full test suite.

This is quite manual, and only really useful for testing if physical (or
virtual) hardware is working as intended. You haven't really specified
exactly what kind of testing you're doing. Maybe you could elaborate a bit?

>     On 6/10/2014 3:40 AM, Wissam Shoukair wrote:
>>
>>     Hi All,____
>>
>>     Does anyone knows if there is a test suite for the PXE booting
>>     process? (similar to IXIA testing)____
>>
>>     I mean a complete testing environment, which includes DHCP server,
>>     ProxyDHCP server, TFTP server and all other services which the
>>     booting process use, and in the end of each test the test suite
>>     generates a report according to the client’s behavior (responses)____
>>
>>     If No, is there any kind of automatic test suite for iPXE?
> 
> I have been pondering how to setup Vagrant to mange 2 or 3 VMs so that I
> can debug deployment scripts, which start with pxe. 
> 
> Not what you are looking for, but seems like it might be useful.

I would say a virtual environment with a couple of VMs for different
purposes is the best approach if your intent is to test deployment
scenarios with different iPXE scripts and such. It should be possible to
automate most of it as you can actually get serial output from most VMs
which should allow you to create automated tests against the content in
the VM log files (for the BIOS part of your test phase).

>>     Last but not least, does anyone knows about a tool which generates
>>     packets according to what it received? For example, If I need to
>>     reproduce an issue with DHCP process, and a PXE client sends DHCP
>>     Discover, this tool should listen on port 67, handle the received
>>     DHCP Discover and generate a DHCP reply according to the info in
>>     the received DHCP Discover?
> 
> How would this be different than a dhcp server?

konobi (on IRC) has been working on a DHCP server written in node.js,
which you might be able to subvert into doing what you want. You can
find his code here: https://github.com/konobi/forge

-- Robin