I got bored waiting for the test machines to come back up so I can run my tests on them, so I wrote two small utilities, one is a multicast sender, I set it to run when the test machine boots up and it sends a message with the machine name in it. There is also a receiver which waits for one or more machines to notify they are up.

Now I can set my kernel to compile and load on the test machines (a script for that already exists :-), I set the receiver to run and when it exits the test is automatically run through ssh with public-key authentication.

All this means is that the usual cycle of 10 minutes waiting for a proper compile, boot and test, is now done with no human interaction, and I have time to get some more coffee (or write a blog entry).