Selenium proved a bit more difficult mainly due to my development environment…

Problem 1

I have VirtualBox setup running ColdFusion, Apache and MySQL.   Using a shared directory I have Apache pointing at my Eclipse workspace which lives on my ‘host’.

Setting up a very simple Selenium test using the new CFSelenium, I just wanted to see if I could get a browser window to pop open…

selenium = new selenium("http://www.google.com/", "localhost", 4444, "*googlechrome");
selenium.start();
selenium.open("/");

This failed with a “The Response of the Selenium RC is invalid: Connection Failure ” error.

The issue is the “localhost” in the Selenium setup.  The test, running on my guest VM can’t communicate with the Selenium RC server running on my host.

What I needed to do was direct things to my host IP which is 192.168.2.2…

selenium = new selenium("http://www.google.com/", "192.168.2.2", 4444, "*googlechrome");

This correctly kicked off a Google Chrome.  But what about Firefox?

Problem 2

Trying to run tests in Firefox introduced another issue:

The Response of the Selenium RC is invalid: Failed to start new browser session: java.lang.RuntimeException: Firefox 3 could not be found in the path! Please add the directory containing ”firefox.exe” to your PATH environment variable, or explicitly specify a path to Firefox 3 like this: *firefox3c:\blah\firefox.exe

I tried explicitly defining the path, using the example from the error, as well as adding my Firefox directory to the path.

selenium = new selenium("http://www.google.com/", "192.168.2.2", 4444, "*firefox3C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe");

No luck.  After a bit of Googling it turns out the correct syntax is:

selenium = new selenium("http://www.google.com/", "192.168.2.2", 4444, "*firefox C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe");

Notice the space between “*firefox” and the path. That is important. :)

Now things work!

It seems like you could easily configure a powerful testing environment by simply loading up several VMs with various flavors of operating systems and browsers and then pointing one set of tests at them all.

1. VM 1 = Windows XP with old flavors of IE and Firefox
2. VM 2 = Windows 7 with IE9, Chrome and Firefox 4
3. Linux, etc…

Looks like somewhere around VirtualBox 2.x they added support to directly load .vhd files (need to read the change log more closely!) :)

So now I can run my IE image along with all the other items I have in VirtualBox instead of installing VirtualPC.

Update:

They run. Yes.

But! In Microsoft’s infinite wisdom they have somehow tied the image to a specific bit of hardware.  When run on VirtualBox the image complains that the hardware has changed and requires re-activation… :(

So I guess it’s VirtualPC or nothing for the IE images.  Way to go Microsoft!

VirtualBox in Taskbar

I remember reading about a ‘headless’ mode in the VirtualBox documentation.  This will setup VirtualBox running as a RDP server – it can run ‘invisibly’ and you can connect via Windows Remote Desktop to intact with the system.

You can either configure the remote settings within the VirtualBox GUI:

Remote Display Dialog

Or pass them in through the command line.  I went this route and created a batch file called start-reviewboard.bat:

REM  Batch script to start VirtualBox instance of ReviewBoard in headless mode
REM  Connect via RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) to port 8000

"C:\Program Files\sun\VirtualBox\VBoxHeadless.exe" -startvm ReviewBoard -p 8000

This starts VirtualBox in headless mode (VBoxHeadless.exe), starts my ReviewBoard vm, and sets up RDP (port 8000).

You can run this script and it should start VirtualBox – but you will still be left with a DOS box sitting there in your taskbar. Turns out it is fairly easy to write a small script to run a batch file silently as well. I created start-reviewboard.vbs:

REM 0 = hide window, 1 = show window (useful for debugging)

Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.Run chr(34) & "D:\scripts\start-reviewboard.bat" & Chr(34), 0
Set WshShell = Nothing

You use this script to run your batch file and pass in a parameter to hide the window (0). I’d recommend setting that to 1 while you get things setup so you can see what is going on and once you have worked out the kinks set it to 0.

When you run it – you should get a DOS window and a message “Listening on port 8000” (or whatever you set the port to). I changed the port to 8000 as I assume Windows is already using 3389 (default RDP port).

To connect I simply start Remote Desktop Connection and enter localhost:8000.

To stop VirtualBox simply issue the following command:

VBoxManage controlvm YOUR_VM_NAME poweroff

• VirtualBox documentation on Shared Folders
• Alternate method of sharing folders
• Ubuntu docs on shared folders

Documentation is now on my wiki:  VirtualBox and ColdFusion 9

What will you end up with? A ‘virtual’ server running Apache/ColdFusion 9/MySQL.  Using VirtualBox’s shared directories you can access your code on the guest system.  This seemed to be the most simple and flexible way to configure things.   In my example I’m sharing the CFEclipse workspace directory but if you are using something different it should be easy to adjust to your configuration.

You could certainly run a GUI version of Ubuntu and install an IDE so you would have a self-contained development environment but with this example I wanted to create a system I could use at work and at home for various projects but not necessarily share the code and settings between them.

If you try this and run into any issues with the documentation – please contact me with corrections!

VirtualBox Export/Import

The original disk image was 4.13GB. Exporting it resulted in two files that totalled 1.75GB! That will easily fit on my 2GB thumbdrive (or Dropbox).

Exporting (and importing) is a straighforward process. Select export – you will be given the opportunity to define some configuration values for your machine, then simply define the export filename. Import is the reverse – select import – location you exported file and proceed. Exporting my 4GB disk took about 25-30 minutes.

In those instructions you had to enter a series of commands in at the command line. I’ve since discovered an easier way to do this.

Virtual Box provides you with a configuration file which you can modify…

On Windows XP this file is located in your home directory and is hidden:

C:\Documents and Settings\priestj\.VirtualBox\VirtualBox

Make sure Virtual Box is shut down and open that file with a text editor.

It’s an XML file and near the top you should see a ExtraData tag. For my Review Board example you would simply add the following lines (adjust your port numbers accordingly):

This also assumes you are using the PCnet network adaptor in Virtual Box. If not – adjust the ‘/pcnet/’ above.

Save the file and restart Review Board and you should be set!

I disabled all my browser cache and tried it in Chrome – same issue. I tried adding a UUID to the CSS call to force the browser to reload.

Then I thought it might be a ColdFusion issue so I spent some time in the Administrator turning all the options on/off (lots of new stuff in CF9!).  That didn’t work either.

Finally I pinged Twitter and John Mason helped me figure out that it was actually an Apache issue. His first thought was it was some caching module but looking in mods-enabled I didn’t see anything cache related. We were both searching on Google and found a few posts where people had similar issues and mentioned adding a line to their config file:

EnableSendfile Off

I have no idea what this does – but I opened up my apache2.conf file, scrolled to the bottom and added it.  Restarted Apache and my CSS was now refreshing!

The Apache docs mention that in some circumstances you may need to disable this:

This directive controls whether httpd may use the sendfile support from the kernel to transmit file contents to the client. By default, when the handling of a request requires no access to the data within a file — for example, when delivering a static file — Apache uses sendfile to deliver the file contents without ever reading the file if the OS supports it.This sendfile mechanism avoids separate read and send operations, and buffer allocations. But on some platforms or within some filesystems, it is better to disable this feature to avoid operational problems:

• Some platforms may have broken sendfile support that the build system did not detect, especially if the binaries were built on another box and moved to such a machine with broken sendfile support.
• On Linux the use of sendfile triggers TCP-checksum offloading bugs on certain networking cards when using IPv6.
• On Linux on Itanium, sendfile may be unable to handle files over 2GB in size.
• With a network-mounted DocumentRoot (e.g., NFS or SMB), the kernel may be unable to serve the network file through its own cache.

For server configurations that are vulnerable to these problems, you should disable this feature.

So hopefully this will prevent someone from going through the same headaches I did.  Now I have to get busy now that everything is working!

Checking out VirtualBox now. Looks like it might be a little easier to configure.

I used to run VMWare but found the install was a bit of a pain (especially on Linux) and while it was nice I was never really blown away.  When I got my GPS and needed to run Windows on my Ubuntu machine I went looking around to see what else was available. I tried QEMU and a few others and finally stumbled upon VirtualBox (which has since been bought by Sun).

While I haven’t tried VMWare in quite awhile VirtualBox has lots of great features which I love:

• Simple install.  I’ve installed on both Windows (with a Linux guest) and on Linux (with a Windows guest) and never had any issues.
• There are a host of easily downloable images at the VirtualBox VDI Index. Want to try Ubuntu, Solaris or gOS? Grab and image and run it.
• Easily share folders between the guest and host – this makes moving files to and from my GPS a snap.
• Seamlessly run Windows inside your host OS.   You can even do this over RDP – a very cool video of that is available on YouTube.

If you haven’t yet checked out VirtualBox I’d certainly recommend giving it a try.