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add notes about virt slave hostnames & using vinagre; fix formatting
May 14, 2015
a08193a · May 14, 2015

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debug_remote_console.adoc

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Debugging on a remote server

If a UI-based test running on a remote server stalls, it it often useful to be able to see that server’s GUI to determine what caused the test to stall or fail.

JBoss Tools' Jenkins jobs will often capture a screenshot of the last thing the slave’s GUI saw before the test was terminated, which will appear in the job’s workspace. But if this is insufficient, or if you need to interact with the UI, you need to connect directly.

SSH access (commandline)

In case you need to access something on a Jenkins slave that you can’t access through Jenkins itself, you can request ssh access to the Jenkins slaves. This will give you filesystem access as the same user running your job’s builds, but will not give you a GUI, only commandline filesystem access.

Contact the JBoss Tools release engineering team (Nick, Denis, Mickael, Max) to learn how to get access. You will also require Red Hat VPN access as the Jenkins servers are firewalled.

VNC access (GUI)

JBoss Tools' Jenkins jobs use Xvnc so it’s easy to monitor their progress or see why a UI test has stalled, using a vncviewer.

Assuming you have been given access, here’s what you need to do:

  1. Go to the job’s current build page and look at the top of the console log to get the HOSTNAME (such as vmg39.somewhere.redhat.com) and DISPLAY variable (such as 12).

  2. Run xvncviewer host:port

Where:

  • port is 5900 + DISPLAY

  • host is the fully-qualified server name (or its IP address)

Thus, in this example:

vncviewer -passwd ~/.vnc/passwd_hudson vmg39.somewhere.redhat.com:5912

Note that slaves named XXX-virtY are actually virtual machines hosted on the XXX hypervisor. There is no reason users should have access there. To access the actual slave, navigate to $JENKINS_URL/computer/XXX-virtY/systemInfo to find out the actual HOSTNAME, such as dhcp123-45.somewhere.redhat.com

Instead of vncviewer you can also use a graphical VNC viewer like Vinagre if your OS supports it.

Contact the JBoss Tools release engineering team (Nick, Denis, Mickael, Max) to get the vncserver password for your job. You will also require Red Hat VPN access as the Jenkins servers are firewalled.