So I'm looking for advice for the following situation: We have several automated front end smoke tests that all run within a reverted VM on our VM server. Initially I thought this would work well with the Jenkins slave installed as a service but quickly found out that Microsoft has locked down the ability for services to interact with the desktop to the point now where it seems like running automated UI tests directly through the Jenkins slave as a service is not an option. Also the slave wouldn't always reconnect to the main Jenkins server consistently after a revert, whether I had it already enabled in the VM snapshot or whether I had it disabled in the snapshot and enabled it using psexec after the revert.
At any rate, I moved to a process whereby all of the smoke test VMs have a snapshot that are powered off. A batch file is installed in the Window startup folders that starts the Jenkins slave from the command line. The Jenkins workflow does the following: 1. Reverts the VM to the clean snapshot 2. Powers the VM on. 3. The batch file is executed after a short timeout and the Jenkins service is started from the command line. This has been the most consistent approach thus far, however, one of my VM slaves still has a random issue connecting back to the main server. The error states that the slave is already connected when it isn't, since once the VM is reverted, that slave should get disconnected. (I will post a copy of the error once it fails again). We attempted to mitigate this problem by adding a Jenkins CLI call to explicitly disconnect the slave, and that hasn't improved matters. Any thoughts or advice on a better approach to starting the Jenkins slave in a reverted VM? I appreciate the ability to see the log output of the automated tests right in the Jenkins console, so I'd really like to stick with the Jenkins slave rather than write another tool or use a different workaround. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Jenkins Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
