The RageNET Weblog

One of the important things of maintaining a big network environment - with a small staff - is to keep up to date documentation on configurations, customizations, and instructions for frequently executed tasks. Commonly when I walk into a new company the documentation is terrible? Why? Because there is either no thought to maintaining documentation or the documentation system/procedure in place is too time consuming to use.

If a documentation system us hard to use it wont be used at all. It should take less effort to update a piece of documentation than to send an email. Locating a document should be as easy and should support freeform text searching. Thats why the best documentation setup I’ve worked with is a wiki. It’s easy to create, locate, and change documentation which encourages people to actually document things! You will have current verbose documentation when you need it.

If you do use a wiki to maintain your documentation produce an offline copy of periodically and burn it on cd. Put this CD along with one copy of every vendor supplied CD into a CD wallet and keep it at the datacenter. it will prove invaluable when you have outages.

Heres the wiki engine I’ve used - and liked - in the past. It runs on top of your vanilla LAMP stack.

tikiwiki.org — TikiWiki CMS/Groupware

This is an example of how not to behave if you are a small business on the internet. A friend of mine simply posted a question on a forum, the entirety of his question was: I’m curious if anybody knows anything about Lucas Environmental Stormwater Services, Inc.? This simple question has led to the owner threatening legal action in email and via rambling voice-mails. It is never a good idea to threaten someone unless they are blatantly in the wrong and doing something clearly illegal. Otherwise you just rile people up and turn what should have been nothing into a huge negative-publicity exercise for your company. For more information see: mhalligan: Greatest voicemail transcript EVER

Technorati Tags: lucas environmental services

While developing a small Ruby on Rails application for The Pilot’s Camping Directory website I ran into a few problems that weren’t solved by a simple google search - so I’m documenting them here for future posterity and googling. I had problems with testing when using some security features to keep out riff-raff. It was not obvious how to handle simple_captcha or simple_http_auth while doing testing so I scratched around the net and pieced together a solution for each of the problems. These work with Rails 1.2. With Rails 2.0 YMMV - but then 2.0 breaks every rails tutorial ever written so I don’t feel bad if this blows up in 2.0.

Using Mocks for testing with simple_captcha

Tests will fail when trying to save something protected by a captcha - obviously - as stoping automated lever-pulling is exactly what a captcha is designed to do. In my application I use capcha at the model level, so I simply override the save_with_captcha method with a simple save.

Here’s what my mocks/test/recipient.rb looks like:

# Can't fake captcha for testing - so we mock it out.
require_dependency 'models/recipient'
class Recipient < ActiveRecord::Base
def self.save_with_captcha
self.save
end
end

Functional Testing HTTP-Auth

To test HTTP Authorization / Authentication you must set up your request environment to pass the http authorization into the application. This is known to work with the simple_http_auth plugin, the plugin that I used for my application. Specify this in the setup section of your functional test.

def setup
@controller = SupersecretController.new
@request = ActionController::TestRequest.new
@request.env['HTTP_AUTHORIZATION'] = "Basic " + Base64.encode64(ADMIN_USER +':' + ADMIN_PASSWORD )
end

Integration Testing HTTP-Auth

Integration testing simulates making requests directly to the webserver. To work with http authorization here you must pass in the appropriate authentication headers when making each get/post request. An example is below:

@htauth = "Basic " + Base64.encode64(ADMIN_USER+':' + ADMIN_PASSWORD )
get("/supersecret/index", nil , {:authorization => @htauth})