FAQ

• Does Faban handle cookies?
  Yes, the HttpTransport automatically handles cookies according to RFC2965, RFC2109, the original HTTP cookies preliminary specification from Netscape®, and some deviations thereof.
  
  
• How can we make a Faban driver talk to multiple servers?
  You can make a Faban driver talk to multiple servers by:
  
  1. Using a fa:hostConfig/fa:hostPorts element in the configuration file to tell Faban about the multiple hosts being used.
  2. In the driver object's constructor, parse the hostPorts field.
  3. Select the host/port entry to use based on either of these policies:

  • Interleaving - each client connects to a different server, subsequently.
  • Block select - the total number of clients are divided into blocks and each block uses it's server. In this latter case, if you have 2 servers and configure 2 agents, each agent will connect to a different server as a result.
  The following code illustrates the server selection:
          // 1. Obtain the host:port list from the config file
          String hostPorts = ctx.getXPathValue(
              ".../fa:hostConfig/fa:hostPorts");
  
          // 2. Parse the host:port list
          List<NameValuePair<Integer>> hostPortList =                                    
              Utilities.parseHostPorts(hostPorts);
  
          // 3. Select the host:port entry this driver should use.
          //    The code below uses block selection. For interleaving
          //    just do this instead:
          //    int serverEntry = ctx.getThreadId() % hostPortList.size();
          int serverEntry = Utilities.selectBucket(ctx.getThreadId(),
              ctx.getClientsInDriver(), hostPortList.size());
  
          // 4. Just use the server entry to index into the hostPort list
          //    to get the host and port to use.
          NameValuePair<Integer> hostPort = hostPortList.get(serverEntry);
  
  
• What ports does Faban use?
  Faban uses ports in the 9980 - 9999 range. Currently these are the list of ports and their functionality:
  
  9980 - Faban HTTP server
  9981 - Agent bootstrap
  9984 - Faban HTTP server shutdown
  9985 - Faban HTTP server coyote connector
  9988 - Runtime stats (currently not enabled)
  9998 - RMI registry
  9999 - Faban logging
  Please avoid using ports in the 9980 - 9999 range, if possible. Faban may use some of the unused ports in this range in the future.
  
  
• The Faban master (harness) cannot connect to the remote system although the system is up and reachable. Faban logs the message  "Retry connecting to <system>, count  <count>." and finally "Could not connect to <system>." How do I know what went wrong?
  If your remote system is otherwise accessible by the Faban master system using ping,  and rsh or ssh works without password verification OR you start the agent as a daemon, then the agent bringup will get logged in the logs/agent.<hostname>.log file on the remote system before logging is initialized to the point it will log to the Faban master. The logs/agent.<hostname>.log file is the starting point for finding issues during Faban bringup. Please check this file to identify the issue.

• How can I get my custom tools's output log to show up in a run's Statistics tab?
  Faban allows you to configure and run any arbitray command that can be invoked from the shell. For the results of the command to show up in the Faban UI, simply ensure that the log is named <tool>.log.<host> where <tool> refers to the tool name, and <host> refers to one of the hostnames in the test configuration.