FIG: A Prototype Tool for Online Verification of Recovery Mechanisms
Pete Broadwell, Naveen Sastry, Jonathan Traupman · 2002
Network applications of the future will require advanced mechanisms for automatic failure recovery in order to provide an acceptable quality of service. Because of this requirement, there is a need for tools that can inject simulated faults to verify a system’s fault detection and recovery methods. We present a set of objectives that such a fault injection tool must meet, and describe a prototype we have developed that meets these criteria. This tool, FIG, is capable of selectively introducing and logging errors at the application/library boundary on a running system. Our expectation is that FIG will be used for software development and verification, as well as for on-site testing of production systems. We use a working version of this tool to test the behavior of several common UNIX applications under simulated failures and offer suggestions from these tests on how to develop software with a higher degree of failure recoverability.