The other day I managed to send off what’s nearly the final patches for adding proper timeout support to the MySQL Cluster management API. Jonas has had a bit of a look, found one thing I’ve missed, but it’ll probably get in somewhere soon (probably the carrier grade edition first, then others… 5.1 makes sense IMHO if only for the amount of management server testing that my patches add).

Unfortunately in what we laughingly call the past the management server – for whatever hysterical raisins – never really received much direct testing. Sure, if the data nodes couldn’t get configuration, autotest couldn’t control the daemons or something then things were obviously broken. But, say, a subtle (or not so much) change in API or behaviour would certainly not be picked up.

Although the real “feature of the year” (not my words) is fault injection for the management server that we can use in testing. The MySQL Cluster kernel (data nodes) already have extensive fault injection that is regularly tested by ATRT (storage/ndb/test in the source tree).

I’ve also started to resurrect my online add node patch that I’ve had sitting around in various states for over a year (actually… about 14 months… i just haven’t touched it in 12) and port it to the latest 5.1 tree (as not sure where it’ll end up, start at the lowest common denominator – possible that it’ll end up in Carrier Grade first too). Now comes the problem of testing the sucker. Previously i’ve had a shockingly bad shell script and hard coded files to make this go.

Obviously, hard coded stuff is not the way to go. The real way is to be able to do everything neatly and programmatically so we can run it as part of the regular autotest.