MC+A

If you are an early adopter of Windows 7 and you own a Google Search Appliance, be sure to set the following local policy so that Kerberos will be enabled:

• Local Security Policy
  • Local Policies
    • Security Options
      • Network Security: Configure encryption types allowed for Kerberos

Enabling all options under Network Security: Configure encryption types allowed for Kerberos

DNS Override

Often during our implementations we find that DNS is not set up properly for the DMZ or other vlan.  In these cases, it would be great if you could specify a hosts file on the appliance.  In version 6.0 of the appliance, you can.

The administration override for DNS can be found here:

http://yourappliance:8000/EnterpriseController?actionType=dns

Google Search Appliance customers typically find value in the product

In August, we published our first public survey here.   Our goal was to explore how many of the basic features of the Google Search Appliance were being implemented by customers of the product.  We promised to share the results of the survey when we completed it.  After 6 weeks, we’ve decided to wrap up this survey and begin to start planning for the next one next quarter.  Here are the results are our observations of the survey.

Summary

At the time of this writing, only 18 responses were received.  The number of responses received makes the survey generally statistically insignificant.  However, the responses fall in line with our previous expectations.  We also feel that most of the responses were from our customers and not of the general population of Google Enterprise customers.  This would mean that that would be mostly in the United States and a systems integrator would have more involvement with them then of a typical Google Enterprise customer.

Overall,

• Customers think the Google Search Appliance provides value
• Customers are typically not investing significantly in their implementation(beyond the cost of the GSA).
• Customers are not using OneBoxes.
• Most customers could be using their appliances to crawl more content.

We’ll begin to create another survey in October, conduct it in November and publish it in December.  If you have input for the survey, please contact us.

Feed Files Awaiting Processing

If you are a developer of external feeds to the Google Search Appliance, you spend a lot of your time waiting for feed process to move from the “Feeds” page to update.  There is an new feature to view the remaining count of documents waiting to be processed.  This can be accessed by going to /getbacklogcount on the back of the feed service port 19900.  Try it out:

http://yourappliance:19900/getbacklogcount

LDAP Server Authentication

Prior to version 6.0, you could perform security trimming via LDAP authentication.  But you always had to maintain a custom list of user accounts.  Now with the release of 6.0.  You can use LDAP groups to list Administrators and Managers.

When enabled, you have to additional boxes to list a LDAP group for both the manager and administrator roles (see below).

Basic information regarding the set up can be found here.

With much publicity, Google release software version 6.0 of the Google Search Appliance(GSA).  They main marketing was focused on GSA^n.  That is that a cluster of GSAs can be combined to index a billion documents.  That is far from many of our customers needs.  This series of blog posts detail some of the hidden gems that can be taken advantage of by the more common implementation.

Hidden Feature 1 – Ranking Framework

In the past couple of years, we often get requests for the GSA to be improved based on the popularity of certain sites or pages.  With the Ranking Framework, you can do just that.  The Ranking Framework you can specify boosting:

1. Based on a url pattern
2. Based on a specific url

These can been written to a file and via an ATOM post, the GSA will fetch this file and added it to a result policy.  The following is an example file Google’s documentation:

http://www.important.com/ 1
http://very.important.com/ 3
http://not.important.com/ -1
http://www.important.com/personal_stuff –3

You’ll then need to go and save the policy file to crawl the rescoring to occur.  The API include adding and deleting as well.  Good Luck!

For the past couple of years, when your hard drives failed you had to create a ticket with Google and ship the box back to Google. Clearly, this is not a scalable support model. Now with the new 7007′s and 9009, users can actually swap out their own drives! Detailed instructions can be found here:

http://code.google.com/apis/searchappliance/documentation/60/fru/hdd_fru_guide.html

For models GB-1001 and GB-7007, there has been a software patch release. Current Google customers under support can go to:

https://support.google.com/enterprise/doc/gsa/00/update_index_page.html

Customers under current support contracts with MC+A will be contacted by MC+A Support.

Continuing from our previous troubleshooting post.

Step 2: Check the appliance’s configuration

If the links are functioning properly in your Google Sitemap, but there is still no SharePoint content being crawled, then you should check to which URLs are being crawled.

Often time’s people make the mistake of entering the URL of their SharePoint site and not the URL of their GSS. Ensure that this is not the case by opening the administrative console of your appliance and going to Crawl and Index > Crawl URLs. You should find the URL of your GSS in the top two fields. If it is not there enter it.

Now, select Freshness Tuning from the options on the left. Enter the URL of your GSS and then select Recrawl These URL Patterns. Allow 20-25 minutes for the changes to take effect.

Then, go to Status and Reports > Crawl Diagnostics and check to see if your GSS’s URL is listed. If you see the sitemap’s URL listed proceed to the next step. Otherwise contact MC+A support.

Now, run a search for content that would be found in your SharePoint site. If the appropriate search results are not returned contact MC+A support for further assistance.

It has come to our support team’s attention that, although we have tried to make the setup and configuration of our Google SharePoint Sitemap (GSS) as straightforward as possible we do field support cases from users dealing with similar configuration issues. This blog series hopes to serve as a FAQ and tutorial covering some common configuration and setup issues.

Issue: My Appliance can’t find any SharePoint content!

This is one of the most frequently submitted support requests. This can be caused by a number of issues. We’ll try to break the troubleshooting process into simple steps to help you solve the issue in a snap!

Solution

Step 1: Make sure the GSS is fully functional

Often, customers immediately assume that there is an issue with their appliance when they do not have the Google Sitemap properly configured.

Check to see if the links in the site are working.

Click on the GSS link.

Now click on various links to ensure that there are no HTML errors. Exclude the Site Link entries drom this test as their results will not be relevant. thos links are simply the actual URLs the sitemap will be charged with directing the appliance to.

If links return HTML errors, the appliance will not successfully crawl the content. If this is what you encounter you know that the issue resides either within your GSS configuration or your SharePoint site.

The next step would be to make sure that all of the proper information has been entered into the Settings section of the GSS.

Make sure that you verify that the account and account password have access to you SharePoint site. To do this, simply navigate to your SharePoint site using the same credentials that your GSS is using. If the credentials are not the issue, you should contact MC+A support for more help.

Next Up…..Step 2: Checking the appliance’s Configuration