TinderboxTLC

Congratulations! You may be the proud new user and/or sheriff of a Mozilla Firefox Tinderbox. Here are some important bits of info you should know.

There's a new sheriff in town

• Sheriffing schedules are posted on the top of the Firefox Tinderbox page
• The Sheriff_Duty page contains a general overview of what sheriff duty entails
• The password for tinderbox/bonsai administration is kept in the sheriffpass bug, if you've been deputized an existing sheriff can CC you to the bug.

Uh oh, something broke

The Tinderbox tends to be inflammable (what a country!). While code checkins can cause obviously cause build/test failures, a box may fail in various ways not related to checkins. Some problems fix themselves in the next cycle, others require filing a server ops bug (in mozilla.org / Server Ops: Tinderbox Maintenance).

Why isn't that box doing anything?

• Some boxes only start doing something when there's a checkin. If a cycle fails for some reason, if will remain red/orange until a checkin triggers a new build.
• Force a build to start by making a trivial checkin:
  • Make a whitespace change
  • Fix a spelling from the spelling bug.

Failed to kill process

• The Windows unit test boxes may randomly fail with errors like:

buildbot.slave.commands.TimeoutError: SIGKILL failed to kill process
Failure: buildbot.slave.commands.TimeoutError: SIGKILL failed to kill process

• This condition should fix itself upon the next cycle (when someone checks in).

XUL Popup test failures

• These are due to browser window focus problems on the test box, often because someone logged in to do maintenance and left something else focused.
• File a server ops bug to have the problem corrected
• Sometimes it's unclear why there's a failure, and the box needs rebooted?

libpr0n reftest failures

• Multiple failures on Windows in modules/libpr0n/test/reftest/ can be due to the box reverting back to 16-bit color mode. See bug 414720 for history.
• Caused by someone connecting to the box with a RDP client in 16-bit color mode.
• File a server ops bug to have the problem corrected.

(add more common failures here)

See also: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Buildbot/IT_Unittest_Support_Document