My Tech Encounters

Removing Bluetooth devices from your Windows 7 machine

2013-06-07T11:40:00.001+05:30

Many a times I connect my laptop to my friends mobile phones over bluetooth to share images and music.

After sharing the Bluetooth devices are present in Explorer when I browse Computer. I need to clean them up so they don't clutter the explorer. Nor having them impact normal usage. Its just personal. I like my machine clean.

So here is how you remove the device

Click on Notifications Icon hover your mouse over Bluetooth Devices icon.
You can alternately go to Control Panel -> Devices and Printers and view the Bluetooth devices. However it will show all other non Bluetooth devices as well.

Right click on the Bluetooth Devices and select Show Bluetooth Devices. The explorer will open new window and show all the bluetooth devices that are registered with your machine.
Right click on the one that you want to remove and select Remove device. Click on yes on the Remove device pop-up to confirm the removal of device.

You should now see the removal process and once the device is removed the pop-up will close by itself.
Confirm the same by going to Windows Explorer and clicking Computer on your left pane. The device will no longer be present in the explorer

Test Automation Framework

2012-04-25T10:13:00.000+05:30

In past few years I have designed and developed Test Automation Framework for several of our customers. At times there have been customers and testers who wanted me to just have Record and Play (R&P) kind of automation and I had hard time convincing them for TAF. They did agree to my advice of having TAF over R&P only after few months down the line of getting test automation introduced and realizing the cost of maintenance taking over new script development and existing automation execution.

This post describes in details why Test Automation Framework (TAF) is essential for better returns on investment (ROI) over bunch of standard record and play scripts.

R&P

R&P has limitations and may not always work. Let me explain how R&P will fail. In R&P you simply record the scripts and play them when you want to test your application after every bug fix or addition of new functionality over a period of time. Your application will have several forms where user need to provide information. Based on these user inputs your application will provide unique identities to inputs and also there will be change of states of several objects in your application. Now every time you execute these recorded scripts you will not get same unique identities and your verification for recorded objects relying on recorded identities will fail the verification causing automated scripts to fail and build being marked as failed build.

TAF helps in taking care of such objects and their obsolete states. It will ensure that every time you execute the automated script correct test data goes into your application and the application output provides the correct results. Any failed test script should provide valid application failure. TAF also assists in ensuring the consistency and accuracy of the application is well maintained.

How TAF looks like ?

TAF consists of automation driver, test scripts, test data, application configuration data, test results/report and automation tool. They work hand in hand in smooth execution of test scripts, creating test data before hand, cleaning up any test data after test execution, analysis of results and compiling reports. The real value added to test automation is from test application library handling verification and actions on objects.

Advantages

Robustness:

There should be minimum impact on automated scripts after there is change in application.
At times Automation engine is way too fast on acting on controls on AUT. So it’s necessary to synchronize test script performs actions on controls when they are actually loaded. Framework allows us to do synchronization and make it robust test scripts

Maintainable:
It should be easy to fix if there are automation test script defects and QA should be able to add new automated test scripts. Framework makes test automation maintainable.

Extensible:

Having framework helps in adding new features and modules to existing test automation suite without having to worry about the impact on the existing test scripts

Reusable/Modular:

With good framework in place helps in reusing the same verification/validation code to be used across the test scripts bringing down the time to develop new test cases

Disadvantages

Test team needs to have moderate development skills. Any tester with knowledge of developing programs using OOPs concepts and SQL should be able to write a strong automation framework.

Resolving MySql Error 1049

2012-04-24T13:47:00.001+05:30

Recently while trying to run a db query on mysql server from mysql client I faced Error 1049.
I finally managed to resolve the issue by modifying the ruby script that I was trying to execute.

Here is what it was before
mysql -u root -p 'password' -h host.mydomain.com

Upon execution it asked for password and after entering password here is what the terminal spitted at me

ERROR 1049 (42000) : Unknown database ''password''

Here is what I did to mysql command in my ruby script

mysql -u root -ppassword -h host.mydomain.com

Executed the script again and it worked fine.

What really solved the issues was removal of " ' " before and after the password and white space between the -p and password.

Hope that helps someone looking for solution to similar problem

Connecting MySql over SSH using C#

2011-09-19T12:54:00.000+05:30

I am sure many of you are looking for C# code to connect to MySql server over SSH.
I hope you are aware of SSH , if not please google SSH and know more about the SSH in details.

.Net does not have its own inbuilt methods or classes for connecting to MySql over SSH.
Hence you will need to download few open source dlls for the implementing your code to connect to MqSql over SSH.

I am going to use sharpSSH here. Thanks to Tamir for writing the code and sharing with the world.
You can download the library from here. Also you will need the secret key file in openSSH format to connect. You can get the key in openSSH format generated from puttygen.

Here is the code for MySql Connection over SSH using C#

using System;

using System.Collections;
using MySql.Data.MySqlClient;
using Tamir.SharpSsh.jsch;

namespace MySQLSSHConnection
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
MySqlConnection myConnection = null;
Session sshSession = null;
try
{
JSch jsch = new JSch();

//Setting the secret key file
jsch.addIdentity(@"D:\...\key-file");
sshSession = jsch.getSession("username", hostname, 22);

Hashtable config = new Hashtable();
config.Add("StrictHostKeyChecking", "No");
sshSession.setConfig(config);

//Setting the SSH connection
sshSession.connect();

//Forwarding the remote port to local port over the connected session
sshSession.setPortForwardingL(3306, "localhost", 3306);

//Connecting to Mysql
string connstring = "Server=localhost;Port=3306;database=Account;Uid=****;Password=****";
myConnection = new MySqlConnection(connstring);
myConnection.Open();
Console.WriteLine("Open OK");
Console.ReadLine();
}
catch(Exception ex)
{
Console.WriteLine(ex.ToString());
Console.ReadLine();
}
finally
{
//Closing database connection
myConnection.Close();

//Closing SSH connection
sshSession.disconnect();
}
}
}
}

Hope this post is helpful.

Automating IP address assignment to NICs

2011-01-18T17:06:00.003+05:30

My workplace has two internet lines wired and wireless and me roaming all over office for meetings, discussions with my laptop greedy for bandwidth. Initially I use to set my IP address manually and reset them back to point to DHCP servers hopping over wireless network and plugging LAN cables. Its really boring to go to IP address window in my Vista and set the IP address. I am sure many of us had spending time (time=money) setting and resetting the IP addresses. So let me show you how you can Automate setting up your IP.

Windows comes with command line tool Netsh which lets you set the network details.

So lets start setting up LAN adapter with IPv4.

Go to your command prompt and type in

netsh interface ipv4 set address name = "Local Area Connection" source=static address= {ip you intend to assign to your machine} mask=255.255.255.0 gateway={your gateway ip address} gwmetric=1

Here is what you are doing

"nestsh interface ipv4 " we are going to set the IPV4 address and not IPV6.

"set address " ordering nestsh command to set the ip address.

"name="Local Area Connection" " Ordering netsh command to set the ip address of adapter with name as Local Area Connection which is your wired adapter on your machine.

"source= static" ordering nestsh to set the ip address manually and not from dhcp

"address=" your intended ipv4 address

"mask=" your subnet mask ip

"gateway=" your gateway ip address. The address of your or proxy

"gwmetric=1" its a metric for default gateway and should be set if you are specifying gateway

Press enter and you have set your Ip address. But all is not over yet. You may also want to set your primary and secondary dns addresses

So lets set our primary dns address. Type in

netsh interface ipv4 set dnsserver name = "Local Area Connection" source = static address= {your primary dns address}

once again we are telling netsh to set primary dns server with ipv4 ip address for interface named "Local Area Connection" manually

Lets set our secondary dns address

netsh interface ipv4 add dnsserver name = "Local Area Connection" address= {your secondary dns

address}

here we are telling netsh to add secondary dns server address.

You can create such scripts in file with .bat extension and whenever you want to set the addresses just run the scripts with elevated rights