Sahi's proxy no longer working properly

Question

I have a suite of tests for our website using Sahi. These tests are automated and feed into our Jenkins build system.

The tests run on a dedicated PC that is used for nothing else. It has Sahi plus all the browsers installed. The Jenkins server makes a remote call to the testing PC to run the tests. Due to the time it takes to run all the tests, this functional test suite is run overnight.

For several months this system was all working beautifully. But suddenly one day a few weeks ago I came into the office and found that all the tests had failed. they haven't worked since. As far as I know, nothing significant has changed (we obviously keep the browser versions up-to-date, but I don't think the failure co-incided with any updates; Sahi itself hasn't had an update since last year)

I've done some work to find out what's happening:

Sahi uses a proxy as part of it's browser control magic, and I believe that this proxy is the source of the problem. But I can't work out how or why.

When the browser under Sahi's control loads the page to be tested, it seems none of the HTTP requests are succeeding. The raw page content is shown (I think because it's cached), but none of the styles, graphics or scripts (except those already cached by the browser). Furthermore, the Sahi script then tries to click on a button to proceed through the test, but the browser fails to load anything. Sahi waits for a bit, but eventually the script times out and the test fails.

I can replicate this on the affected PC when running Sahi manually. It happens on any site, and in all browsers. However it doesn't happen on my own desktop PC, which has the same versions of all the relevant software installed. And of course, it worked fine in the past on the test box.

I have tried uninstalling Sahi and the browsers, and re-installing from scratch. This has not made any difference. (I appreciate that uninstalling often doesn't actually delete everything, so perhaps there's more I could do here?)

I'm really hoping someone can help me here, because I'm unsure what else to try.

Many thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I wasn't able to get to the bottom of this. I suspect it was something blocking the Sahi proxy from working, but I couldn't find the culprit.

I'd wasted too much time on it, and the machine it was running on wasn't being used for anything else anyway, so my final solution to this was to re-install the OS from scratch.

This has solved the problem. It hasn't helped me understand why it happened, but as long as it's working, eh?

Thank you to everyone who stopped by.

Answer 2

Since it happens on all browsers, it looks like a firewall setting may be preventing access to port 9999. Turn off the firewall and check. If you see any exceptions on the Sahi console, you could post that too.