MC+A

Our customers are advised that Google Enterprise has released a patch to Google Search Appliance software 6.10.  This patch is labeled P4.  Google strongly recommends upgrading to this patch version if you are on the following versions:

• 6.10.4.G.22
• 6.10.4.G.22-P1

A list of the fixes included in this release can be found here.

MC+A supported customers should contact their account rep or MC+A support to schedule a time when the update can be applied.  There is a small outage equivalent to 20 seconds * the number of collections.

Google released P2 to software release 6.8.  Google strongly recommends that you install the patch if you are running 6.8.0.G30 or 6.8.0.G30-P1.

The following fixes are included:

MC+A support customer should contact support to schedule an update time.  Others are required to login to Google’s support portal that is included in your Google Search Appliance welcome email.

Happy Thanksgiving!

MC+A Support

The Problem

Header requests is the default method for how the Google Search Appliance (GSA) performs authorization on a document level (also known as late binding) for web based content (See The Header Requester).  There are numerous advantages and disadvantages.  One of the minuses, is that it relies on the content source to adhere to HTTP protocols.

We’ve experienced numerous content systems that don’t fully support the correct HTTP response for this to work.  In many cases of Lotus Domino or Microsoft SharePoint, a friendly message is return or their is an embedded header.  This causes the to misinterpret the response from the server and think the user has access to the document.

The common method pre 6.4 was to implement a SAML interface and develop custom code to handle the logic for the variety of content sources.  Google released several Open Source projects to jump start your efforts.  Most notably they are:

• Google Value Security Framework
• Google SAML Bridge for Windows

The Solution: Header Request Deny Rules

Those tended to be difficult for our clients to implement and another piece of infrastructure to deploy and manage.  In version 6.4, Google has added additional rule validation on the appliance.  You now can check the most common sets on the appliance with simple configuration:

Screen shot of the Header Request Deny Rule Form

This virtually eliminates many of the customizations that we’ve made for the wrong response.  How Neat!!!

Previously I had authored a series of new features that came as part of the 6.0 software release that was not noted in the software release. For many of our customers, these feature releases are more significant than say GSA unification since they only have a single GSA.

Metadata Base64 Encoding

In software release 6.2, you can now base64 encode both metadata names and metadata values.

 <record url=<a href="http://www.mcplusa.com">http://www.mcplusa.com</a> action="add" mimetype="text/html">
<metadata>
<meta encoding="base64binary" name="acdJvamFXQWjdF9uWEXl" content="asdfLKZUoiuoiasdfmoaioeit">
</metadata>
</record>

Note: the correct encoding attribute is base64binary and not base64 as Google’s documentation states.

Earlier this week, Google release version 2.4.  This is the first public accessible version of the connectors.  Connections as part of this release are:

• SharePoint
• Documentum
• LiveLink
• FileNet
• File Systems – new (aka beta)
• Databases – new (aka beta)

Upon first view of them, it looks like they incorporate many of the suggestions we have posted on this blog over the past few months.  (i.e. use javascript to produce the results [Thanks Jon Doctor!]).  We’ll be posting a how to get the best search out of SharePoint with a Google Search Appliance shortly.

Customers interested in assistance with deployment of the connectors please contact us.

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.