Out of curiosity, I’ve told myself I’d try to compile my own custom kernel. Not that I have any particular need for it, but I just wanted to know how it’s done without using modern methods such as running package managers to do the job for you. After quite some time, I eventually succeeded, but what I want to share in this article is how to investigate some errors that might occur and how to name your custom kernel version.

If you are one of those people wondering how you can get involved in testing, this article might be of interest to you. I will try to share a few bits about where I think is best to start a testing career.

I’ve recently written a post on sqa stackexchange where I shared a few thoughts about testing software with no or little experience. I believe my post has been received well because I wrote the post remembering my first days in testing. In this blog article, I’d like to pick up on that and share a few ways a tester can do to learn about a product. These ways could be used by anybody, even inexperienced testers who might find them especially useful because they can lead them towards some interesting bugs very quickly.

Testers usually don’t need to know every small detail of SQL and/or DBMS, however, they still need to know enough not to get lost in the middle of their work. I’ll show a few examplex of what makes MS SQL unique and how to use this DBMS within SMSS.

Not long time ago, I used a useful tool rkhunter to scan my system for possible rootkits and other vulnerabilities. The first time I came across rkhunter was on Arch wiki site. However, I had not much idea about how the scan for rootkits actually works. After some time spent reading, I’d like to share a thing or two about how rkhunter actually works. It might shed some light on the whole idea of rootkits as well.

It’s certainly more common to upgrade software, but on those rare occasions when something breaks with a higher version, it’s useful to know how to downgrade a particular package.

Robot Framework is a useful tool for test automation. It’s mostly used, and suitable, for UI testing because it can be easily integrated with Selenium API. But there could also be many other libraries, either written by other people or we can come up with our own libraries that extend the number of use cases for which Robot could be used. I’ve recently needed to use Robot in a way when it looks into a DB and checks a few things there. I’m going to share with you a part of my outcome.