Upgrading & Troubleshooting NicTool

[matt]

Before upgrading NicTool, a good idea would be to test the new version yourself. There are three different test suites. The perl tests suites get run when "make test" is run in the NicToolServer or NicToolClient distribution directories.

• NicToolServer tests: the 'make test' test suite is remarkably comprehensive. So long as it has a fresh set of database tables to test with, the test suite should succeed. With existing installs, a bunch of the delegate tests may fail but everything else should succeed.
• NicTool API tests: the 'make test' should always succeed if the t/test.cfg file has the appropriate NicTool login credentials.
• NicToolClient tests: 'make test' should always succeed. Sadly, the reason the tests pass is because the test suite is very incomplete. Much of the HTML produced by NicToolClient is dynamically generated by OBF functions which are difficult to test.  Much of the work in NicTool versions 2.10 to 2.13 has been busting the Big Functions up into subroutines that are much easier to grok and test.
• The last is a matrix I use. This has been slowing expanding as needed. More watchers and testers are welcome.

The easiest way to test is simply to visit the NicTool demo install (http://www.nictool.com/demo/) . You can expect the demo nictool to always have the latest released version installed, and quite often it will have pre-release versions.

NicTool test plan

- server 'make test'
- api 'make test'
- client 'make test'
- browser tests
   - keep web inspector open to watch for errors
   - test each object type page loads
      - group
      - zones
      - nameservers
      - users
      - log
   - create test objects
      - sub-group
      - user
      - nameserver
      - zone with template
      - zone w/o template
      - IPv4 reverse zone
      - IPv6 reverse zone
      - zone records
         - a
         - aaaa
         - cname
         - txt
         - spf
         - mx
         - srv
         - ns
         - ptr ipv4
         - ptr ipv6
   - move test objects
      - user
      - nameserver
      - zone
   - delegate test zone & record
      - 1 zone
      - 2 zones
      - 1 zone record
   - edit test objects
      - edit zone properties
         - mailaddr
         - description
         - serial
         - minimum
         - refresh
         - retry
         - expire
         - ttl
      - edit zone nameservers
      - edit resource records
         - edit one of each type of RR
         - edit name
         - edit address
         - edit MX preference
         - edit SRV port
   - delete test objects
      - 10 zone records
      - 2 reverse zones
      - 2 zones
      - nameserver
      - user
      - sub-group
   - recover test objects
      - zone
      - zone record