Research On Virtual Peripherals And Automated Testing Of Mainframe Monitoring System

With the rapid development of computer technology, the tight coupling of computer hardware and software has become the trend of IT industry. In the mainframe computer systems, software and hardware perform their own duties, keeping tacit cooperation with each other, which makes the machine work normally.The powerful function of the mainframe computer system costs a lot but can be applied widely. In order to ensure the mainframe computer systems work normally, it is necessary to monitor and control the status of them in the engineering research.Research of this paper is based on the actual project SVPM:supervision system. And such system mainly works on GUI interface program, combined with peripheral devices, which is used to monitor and control the mainframe remotely. The GUI interface program is implemented by GTK graphic tool library in Linux operating system. The supervision system consists of many peripheral devices, including large numbers of GUI interface’s code and tedious system tests. Therefore, this paper carried out a series of research on the issues exist in the system.Firstly, this paper makes analysis on the issues in the supervision system. After combining with background of the project’s development, the solutions to the issues were put forward to optimize design of the system.Secondly, for the miscellaneous peripheral devices, a virtual design was put forward as well. For the virtual router, by using the technique "Iptables" to filter out IP packet and by establishing a routing table according to the system network model, the function of the router can be realized then. For the virtual printer, with the interaction between Webpage and the supervision system, then printer’s documents can then be displayed, realizing the function of printing without any paper.Finally, considering the drawbacks of manual testing, GUI interface test was tested automatically with full use. The realization of the GUI interface operation commands’ simulation is based on the LDTP tool library.The scripts of automated testing are designed by Python based on the function modules. By them, the automated testing was realized.In the supervision system, the achievement of the virtual design simplifies the peripheral devices. Then the automated testing could work stably, improving the efficiency of the system’s test.