That Thing Called Search

Search not working. Phone ringing incessantly. Severity 1 and 2 tickets being raised by Service Center @ speed of light. Damn!! This Search had to fail on a Friday Night.
Phew!!! All of us ALUI/WCI/Plumtree Portal Administrators must have faced this issue one or the other time. After a recent such outage with Search I decided to write down some common remedies for Search.
As usual, I do not vouch for these, but I have seen them work in our portal environment. Please use your brains and do not just follow everything mentioned here cause I am a lazy blogger and might have missed some points.

Search Rebuild Using Search Service Manager:
Under Select Utility Choose Search Service Manager

In the Next Repair Date, Choose a date in the past. Suppose today is August 4,2010 then choose a date from last week.

This causes the Search Update Agent to perform an index repair (or, in this case, rebuild) the next time it is run. Once you have selected an older date click on Finish.

No go ahead and run the Search Update job. Normally there are 3 search update jobs. Please unscheduled the other 2 search update jobs and run just one of the jobs. You will see that the job runs in Repair Mode. Once the job completes successfully, it would have repaired your index and your problems should be resolved.

The Database Method:
My boss tells me I am the most irresponsible person, when I tell him to perform this step. But let me tell you, responsible or not…..this works always….without fail. Let me explain the scenario when this works.
Suppose you have 10 folders and 100 documents in your portal and for some God forsaken reason you are seeing only 96 of those 100 documents. No matter what you do, the other 4 documents do not come up in search. Now is the time to step into the DB server and try restoring order into this portal by rectifying the issue.
Go ahead and browse through the tables of your portal and find two tables “PTSEARCHSTATUS and PTCARDSTATUS” Change the status columns of PTSEARCHSTATUS table to 1 while the PTCARDSTATUS takes a value of 4
Now go ahead and simply run your Search Update job. Voilla!!! All 100 documents will be searchable.

Oracle has started a very good thing of recording their free webinars and allowing others to go through them and even download them for later reference.
Recently they conducted a webinar on Search. Please find below the URL for your reference:
The Search Webinar can be downloaded for viewing here:
https://oracleaw.webex.com/oracleaw/lsr.php?AT=dw&SP=MC&rID=56494767&rKey=99a5997008e7d549

ALUI Log File Locations

Component	Logs
ALUI Portal	$PT_HOME/ptlogging/logs/portal/*.spy
Automation	$PT_HOME/ptlogging/logs/portal/automationserverwrapper.log
Document Repository	$PT_HOME/ptdr/6.1/logs/drLogs.txt	$PT_HOME/ptdr/6.1/logs/wrapper.log
Search	$PT_HOME/ptsearchserver/6.1/adminui/logs/wrapper.log	$PT_HOME/ptsearchserver/6.1/[$SearchNode]/logs/logfile-trace-yyyy-mm-dd	$PT_HOME/ptsearchserver/6.1/[$SearchNode]/logs/logfile-event-yyyy-mm-dd
Publisher	$PT_HOME/ptcs/6.4/logs/service.log	$PT_HOME/ptcs/6.4/logs/container.log	$PT_HOME/ptcs/6.4/logs/boot.log
Collaboration	$PT_HOME/ptcollab/4.2/logs/collaboration_log.yyyy-mm-dd.txt	$PT_HOME/ptcollab/4.2/settings/logs/collaboration.log	$PT_HOME/ptcollab/4.2/settings/config/wrapper.log
Notification	$PT_HOME/ptnotification/4.2/settings/logs/notification.log	$PT_HOME/ptnotification/4.2/settings/logs/wrapper.log
Analytics	$PT_HOME/ptanalytics/2.1/logs/analyticsui.log	$PT_HOME/ptanalytics/2.1/logs/asmanagerui.log	$PT_HOME/ptanalytics/2.1/logs/configurator.log
Studio	$PT_HOME/ptstudio/2.2/logs/wrapper.log	$PT_HOME/ptstudio/2.2/logs/ptstudio_log.yyyy-mm-dd.txt

******* Adieu *******

Hmmm!!!!!

Writing a farewell mail is a tough job you know. At least for first timers like me. Sadly Google miserably fails to help!! Well I just kept staring at my monitor wondering how all the 4.5 years have passed like a flash. I never thought this day would also come. But here it is……

Still remember my first day vividly, I came here as a boot camper, wide eyed with a starlit gaze and scared about the corporate world. Employee ID – 53280 that’s what I was branded. Life on Earth became Heaven on Earth for me when I received my first paycheck here. Honestly the first think I did was take out the whole salary from the ATM machine and stare at it the whole night. I didn’t know how to spend so much money (pun intended, my salary was not much). :)

IPL season 3 has just ended and today I stand Not Out after completing my half century in Birlasoft. Yes, I have completed 52 months in Birlasoft. I started off as an MCA trainee, today as I look back I have treaded a long and arduous path.

Frankly, it is difficult for me to end this relationship with Birlasoft. Today, I am what I am because of Birlasoft.
I gained some of my best buddies here.
I gained the love of my life and now my wife here.
I gained the best mentors here.
I gained the best team members here.
I gained all my knowledge here.

Thanks are in order for a lot of people who have made an indelible impression on my life @ Birlasoft. Starting with Abhishek Gupta and Mandip Vats who selected me from Campus. The journey wouldn't have been possible without the great support from all my Managers / Mentors, R. Srikanth, Samrat Choudhury, Augustine Sunand and Ashutosh Goyal who had the trust and faith on me that I could achieve and deliver beyond their expectations.

I can probably write another 2000 words on my experiences with Birlasoft. Don’t worry guys n gals, I won’t bore you with it. I would reserve it for my blog. But they say, Duniya Gol Hai……kya pata kab …..kaha….kaunse mod par hum dobara milenge…….. :)

Until then wish all of you all the very best for all your endeavors, be it personal or professional. :) :)

I will share my new mobile number as soon as I get it. I can always be reached on srinammisra@gmail.com

Some News

Long time no see...... Well there's some news from my end..... I have finally decided to call it quits at Birlasoft. I had been associated with Birlasoft for 4.5 long looong loooooong years. It was a mixed bag for me......I had some very good as well as some unfortunate experiences over there.....Well the experiences will make the content of another blog post......but sometime later.....

Currently I am going to enjoy this sabbatical away from work with some cooking.......reading.....travelling.....

Recommended Portal Server Reboot Order

I work in a project where we also have control over the servers. Each time patches are installed or for some godforsaken reason if the portal environment shows signs of breathing its last.......What do we do ?......

Voila!!! Restart the servers so that we delete all connection pools and have an environment as good as new. In medical parlance....restarting the servers is like giving CPR to a dying person....
Oh!! By the way, recently I had seen a man performing CPR on a monkey that was eloctrucuted infront of our office.
Coming back to the CPR procedure.....I mean the server reboot order, Oracle WCI/BEA ALUI/Plumtree has a specific order to it which unfortunately is not present in any of the Admin guides available. Thats the reason I decided to document it for your benifit.

Shutdown

1. Portal server
2. Other component servers
3. Database server

Startup

1. Database server
2. Other component servers
3. Portal ServerPortal servers depend on the database server being up.

It is required that the database server is up first and shut down last.

My personal experience with portals says that, one should shut down the main portal server first but refrain the temptation of restarting it first. The main portal server should be started up the last with the other component servers being turned on before that.

What is Quiesce ?

What in God's name is Quiesce???No, Quiesce doesn't mean the same user online can't do anything or a new user can't access the SharePoint site.
I have collated the following information and hopefully this will help you to understand how Quiesce works.
Quiescing comes into the limelight especially where long running sessions are required. Not all features in your portal environment are affected when you Quiesce your farm. There are two primary features that make use of Quiescing: Microsoft Office InfoPath Forms Services (IPFS) and Microsoft Office Excel Services. Many other features and operations do not need to use Quisecing because they do not have long running sessions where users enter data over multiple server requests without having to save information. For instance, when editing an item in a SharePoint list, SharePoint handles that in a single transaction to the database, storing the information, so no Quiescing needed here.
However, in IPFS, a form filling session may require several communications with a server as the form posts back for server-side data processing for operations such as view switching. Data from the session is usually not saved until the very end when a user submits or saves the form that he or she is filling. Voila!!! Quiescing comes into the picture here.
If an administrator takes the farm offline while some users were already filling it out, the users would lose all of the data they have been trying to input so far in their session and you would be recieving lot of HATE MAIL in your inbox for doing this ;-)
Therefore, if an administrator is going to bring the farm offline, in order to preserve their customer data, they would make a plan of action and first quiesce the farm. This prevents new requests from coming in to start filling out new forms, but it allows existing form filling sessions to continue. When the sessions are all completed, or when an administrator-specified time elapses, the farm enters the quiesced state where no new requests are accepted. The farm can then be safely taken offline at this point without causing any data loss for users and lets be fair, you gave a fair deal of time for end users to fill in thier data in thier forms.
Hope this was helpful.

Trivia Quiz

Identify and tell what is the significance of this temple in the great Indian Politics.