Calling tera term from jenkins hangs

[Chris Amos]

Sorry, I know not strictly a jenkins issue, jenkins remains responsive and can kill the hung build so jenkins is fine.

But something about the jenkins environment messes up teraterm and I need a clue.

My build job is pretty straightforward;

1 Source from SVN

2 execute batch file to build (3 types of gcc and visual studio)

3 execute batch to do doxygen and build installer.

4 execute batch to install onto custom hardware and do a simple smoke test.

The batch files mean I can run the processes by hand, it is all working.

Step 4 fails under jenkins, this batch file runs a utility to program my UUT over USB/I2C then calls the teratermpro macro utility to connect over USB/RS232 to configure and interrogate the device, the result of all of this is an IP address in a file (it is a wifi IoT device). I take the IP address and ping it to see the device is on the air and talking.

Under the covers the teraterm macro program opens a copy of the teraterm GUI application and controls it, I think by injecting messages into its windows message Q.

When run under Jenkins the macro step that opens the main application is executed and never returns, in task manager I can see both the macro program and the gui app sitting there doing nothing.

I searched here for tera term issues and found it is new, but perhaps something similar has happened in the past with other program.

If no obvious answers, how do I debug it, a thread dump for jenkins seems popular, but jenkins is fine, would it help in this case (and a how-to)?

Thanks

Chris

running jenkins 2.5 on windows 7, all local.

[Eric Engel]

This is probably a Windows specific problem, because services under Windows cannot interact with GUI elements. So if you installed Jenkins as a Windows service it may not be able to access the GUI elements of your teraterm application. I witnessed the same problem for automated GUI testing.

On Windows you would need to start the Jenkins master directly from a user session (if everything runs on one machine and you have no slaves) or start the slave for this job by JNLP (you may do this on startup).

 

Regards

Eric

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[Daniel Beck]

> On 18.05.2016, at 11:47, Eric Engel <eric....@motionlogic.de> wrote:
>
> On Windows you would need to start the Jenkins master directly from a user session (if everything runs on one machine and you have no slaves) or start the slave for this job by JNLP (you may do this on startup).
>

It's also possible to enable GUI access to services (but whether that's a good idea, I don't know).

[Chris Amos]

Thanks Eric,

Good clue, I wonder if a fix may be to run a slave on my machine to get around this, which would fit with the plan.

Right now it is all a simple jenkins service on my dev pc, the plan is a linux server controlling slaves for linux and windows builds.

Chris

[Chris Amos]

Hi Daniel,

Yep, prompted by Eric I went off and found the service option to allow the process to interact with the desktop.

And now it works.

But not quite perfect, I get a flashing icon on the task bar to tell me that a program wants to interact with the desktop, when I let it interact all I get is an empty cmd window that seems to hail from java/jenkins, nothing from teraterm which I had told to start invisibly anyway.

I just need the 'allow but ignore' option.

Ta

Chris

On Wednesday, 18 May 2016 10:47:19 UTC+1, Eric Engel wrote: