Author

Topic: Cross-client test data (Read 2851 times)

newbie
Activity: 33
Merit: 0
July 06, 2011, 12:31:24 PM
#2
At the moment I am just parsing wireshark dumps for my protocol decoder, so I would be very interested in this too!
I can get a bit of a wiggle on with my python  stuff so you can at the protocol level decode it (well assuming I did it right), for decoding I more or imitated the look of a raw representation of blockexplorer. I am about 2 weeks away before I can release anything decent but I should be able to put something halfway working on within a couple of days, if anybody is interested.
legendary
Activity: 1652
Merit: 2216
Chief Scientist
July 05, 2011, 05:06:13 PM
#1
I'm thinking about how to do higher-level testing of bitcoin, and I think we could get a lot of mileage out of a testing harness that works at the network protocol level.

I'm thinking of testing things like proper handling of block chain re-orgs and valid and invalid transactions.

Examples:

Block chain re-org test:
  • Start a bitcoin client with an empty wallet and just the genesis block, -noirc listening on a non-standard port.
  • test harness connects, then feeds it a pre-canned block chain
       ... then sends it a longer fork
  • test harness makes sure client accepted the longer chain by sending it a getblocks messsage
      (or disconnects and re-connects and checks the start_height in the version message)

Valid/invalid transaction tests
  • Start bitcoin client as above
  • test harness connects, sends a series of valid and invalid transactions (via inv message and then responding to getdata).
  • test harness checks to see if transactions were accepted or rejected by checking responses to getdata (should be no response for invalid transactions)


A set of good data files with "tx" and "block" (and "inv" and all the rest) messages in them, combined with something like pexpect could make a good test system. I'm thinking they should be human-readable (with a proxy listening tool or wireshark plugin or something that dumps bitcoin protocol into the human-readable form) but pretty low-level; maybe a version message looks like:
Code:
{ "version" : [ "u32:31900", "i64:1", "i64:1309899496", "addr:127.0.0.1:8333", "addr:127.0.0.1:5432", "u64:1235876", "s:", "i32:98645" ] }


So, before I start working on something like this:  Anybody already doing something similar?
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