Online banking testing on Unix/Windows

[Christian Stimming]

The online banking features of gnucash are available both on windows and all 
unix,  using the aqbanking library for actual connectivity. However, I think 
we need some more testing feedback, especially for the windows port of 
gnucash+aqbanking, because although aqbanking compiles nicely on windows, it 
still might contain some bugs which need to be ironed out.

Therefore I'd like the other win32 testers (and whoever is up to this as well, 
regardless of your IS) to also test the AqBanking online banking features. 
The main online banking technique of aqbanking is HBCI, which is only 
available in Germany. For HBCI we are in the happy situation to use a test 
account at a test bank server for HBCI. This test account is being provided 
by the developers of the Java online banking software "hbci4java". Thanks a 
lot, Stefan Palme. (For the other interesting online banking technique, OFX 
DirectConnect, I don't know of any test account anywhere, so it is 
unavailable for testing purposes, I'm afraid.)

For this HBCI test account, I've summarized the aqbanking setup instructions 
here: http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/AqBanking 

The instructions are given for the command-line tools because these are 
available on Windows by default. For the graphical setup wizard, the 
explanation is in the wizard itself. It should be straightforward for you to 
read the required server address from the wiki page as well. The test account 
provides three accounts using the security technique PIN/TAN of HBCI. HBCI 
itself provides other (more secure) security techniques as well, but this one 
is especially convenient for testing purposes.

Once you've set up the test online banking accounts, you can try out the basic 
online banking functionality of HBCI as described here 
http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/AqBanking#Using_the_test_account

All of these instructions *should* work on all Unixes. On Windows, I have seen 
these work at least once on a win2000 machine last week; when I tried later, 
not all of the three online actions actually worked. So YMMV on windows, but 
I'd appreciate any feedback that someone can provide here.

Regards,

Christian