… continued from Part 6  —  [Other Episodes]

Killa Hertz’ friend Mike Budrewski had analysed the logs and had determined that there was a Java memory error. Killa was investigating further.

 

Killa Hertz & The Case of the Missing Documents – Part 7

“Trudy – I need to look at the web server.”

Trudy looked up with a puppy dog look in her eyes. She quickly opened up a new remote session and logged me onto the web server.

“OK”, I said to myself, “somehow this thing is throwing a memory error.” I fired up the task manager. The thing was using a little more memory than normal, but it looked OK.

Suddenly my mobile phone rang. Trudy jumped. The girl was skittery.

I answered the phone and heard Mike’s voice. “Killa, I was able to find some documentation about this eResults application. There’s nothing explicit about the error, but it clearly states  that it requires 2Gigabytes RAM. How much is that thing running?” “1 gig” I replied. I was happy. It looked like an open and  closed case.

At the same time, I was annoyed. Why the hell was a law firm skimping on things like memory?

I looked over at Trudy – she was busy staring at numbers in a spreadsheet. “Trudy – this server doesn’t have enough memory. What you can you do to get another gig installed?”. She looked up. She wrinkled her nose, and trundled her chair next to mine. Her perfume was clearly set on “Kill” this morning..

“Umm, let’s have a look.” The web service server was a virtual one. That meant that, in principle, it should be easy to increase the memory. “Yes,” she said, in that excited voice of hers. “However, I’ll have to let the boss know. We’ll probably need to take the server off-line.” I went and grabbed a coffee while she called her boss.

After 5 minutes, she came into the coffee room. “Sure thing Killa, we can do it tonight.” I put down my cup. “Trudy – how long does it take to crawl all the documents in the docbase?” “Well…” she started. “The last time we did it, it took about a week.”

Suddenly, I had the urge to be sitting on a stool at O’Learys with a glass of Jack.

“A week is a long time to see if this is going to work.” Even though I was getting paid by the day, there were still limits.

“Let’s see if we can split up the load.” Trudy’s eyes opened wide. She was a good kid.

“Look – you’ve got over 800,000 documents in there. We’ll split up the documents into smaller groups. Then we start a crawl on each group of documents. If this memory increase doesn’t help, and a crawl doesn’t work properly, then it doesn’t mean we have to recrawl all the documents.”

Trudy ran over to her desk and grabbed a pad of paper (it had roses in the corner of each pad) and a pen. “Let me get this down,” she said.

“Ok Trudy, let me show you what needs to be done.”

to be continued…

… Part 8

 

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… continued from Part 5 —  [All Episodes]

Killa Hertz had worked through the night with help from Trudy. They had gone through the indexing process. It looked like the answer could be in the eResult log. Killa had sent them to his super-geek friend Mike to see if he could make sense of it.

 

Killa Hertz & The Case of the Missing Documents – Part 5

The alarm clock went off at 8am. Swinging my arm I knocked the thing off the bedside table. Being electric, it just kept beeping. I pull the plug out of the wall.

After leaving Trudy’s office last night, I made a phone call. My friend Mike was awake. I expected that. He liked his internet games. I swung past his place with the CD. Trudy had made sure that there was only the eResults log on it.

Mike invited me to stay while he analysed the log.  His flat was small, and messy, and there was no bourbon. I declined. “Mike – call me in the morning when you have an answer.”

So now – it was morning. Still hot and as sticky as it was last night. After swallowing two cups of coffee, I headed into Trudy’s office. She was there looking at the system. “Hi Killa!” she squeaked far too enthusiastically. I hate morning people. “Have you heard anything?”. I told her that Mike would call me as soon as he had news for me.

“But you know Trudy, it could be that the system is choking while it’s doing the indexing. Let’s have another look at it.”

She logged onto the system for me and then let me sit in her chair. I had a look at the Crawler Impact Rules in SharePoint. There were none. I poked around and checked out a few other things. The system was 32 bit. Not the best, but didn’t explain why the crawls were suddenly stopping short. There were a few settings in the registry that could be tweaked to increase the amount of memory used. But, again, no point changing those…yet. I made note of them anyway.

Around 9:30, my cell phone rang. It was Mike. He wanted me to come around.

Knocking on his door, I was met by Mike in the same clothes that he had on the last time I saw him. He was talking fast. Clearly a sign of too many caffeine-loaded energy drinks. I didn’t want to be around when those wore off.

Mike pulled a stool over next to his chair. The computer screen was filled with the error logs. “I looked through the logs, Killa. There’s a hellova lot of information in there. I went through each line. This is a smart app.” I could hear that Mike was impressed. “There are a lot of errors, but they are nothing to be worried about. It looks like the system is just reporting that it couldn’t find certain things. These don’t look like they are causing the crawl to fail. I double-checked them anyway. It took me awhile, but about an hour ago I think I finally pinned it down”

I glanced at Mike. He liked his moment of importance. “So what do ya think it is?”, I asked. Mike continued “Memory” he said.”But their SharePoint system is running fine” I said. “No – not the SharePoint server – it’s a Java error.”

“I need coffee” I said. His response was to thrust a can of energy drink in my hand. It was better than nothing.

I thought back over the process. SharePoint indexed the docs. But Java wasn’t used for that. The documents were transferred in batches from the Documentum docbase to the SharePoint server first. And this was via a web server that did use Java.

“Mike – I’ve gotta go check something. I’ll call you.” Mike handed me a pile of paper. It was a printout of the error log with the Java error highlighted. “As always – Thanks”.

I arrived back at Trudy’s office. “Trudy – give me access to your web server.”

to be continued…

… Part 7

 

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… continued from Part 4 —  [All Episodes]

Killa Hertz had taken control of the computer. Running a few DQL queries he had been able to determine how many, and what sort of, documents there actually were in the docbase. The number that SharePoint was crawling didn’t match…

 

Killa Hertz & The Case of the Missing Documents – Part 5

After taking a swig of cold coffee, I decided to learn more about eResults.

It was a protocol handler that allows SharePoint to talk with Documentum. As well as that, it keeps track of the security of  the documents in Documentum. This ensures that security trimming is applied correctly to the documents returned in the search results.

Looking at the SharePoint’s Search Administration screen, and the configuration screen for eResults I deduced the following:

• A content source has been set up that points to the Documentum docbase.
• At regular intervals, SharePoint connects to Documentum using the information defined in the content source.
• Based on a custom filter, SharePoint retrieves a list of the documents that Documentum has 20,000 at a time.
• Using a web server as the intermediary, SharePoint copies the documents from the docbase to a folder on the Index server.
• The documents are then crawled, and when each document is finished, it is deleted from the folder.
• At the same time, that the list of documents is retrieved from Documentum, the Documentum security is also translated so that it matches a corresponding group in Active Directory.

Luckily eResults kept detailed logs about its activities. I opened the latest one. There was a lot of information. I started looking through it.

There were several places where the word “error” appeared in the log. They looked like pretty harmless entries, but I wanted to be sure. I’d have to call in a favour.

Mike Budrewski was an old friend of mine. He was born with a copy of “The Geeks Guide to Being a Geek” in his hands. What Mike didn’t know about technology wasn’t worth knowing. Problem with Mike was, if you didn’t have a keyboard, and a monitor, he didn’t really feel comfortable talking to you. Mike wasn’t really a people person.

I looked at Trudy. She was looking tired. “Let’s call it a night” I said. “Copy these log files onto a CD for me. I’ve got a guy who will look over them tonight, and I should have an answer by tomorrow.”

Trudy looked pleased. It was 3 o’clock in the morning, & the caffeine was starting to wear off.

to be continued…

… Part 6

 

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… continued from Part 1 — [All Episodes]

Private Eye Killa Hertz has received a call from Trudy who works at a law firm. Their search tool was not returning all their documents. Killa heads to their office to investigate.

Killa Hertz & The Case of the Missing Documents – Part 2

Trudy introduced some of the suits. They were lawyers, and they all looked like they had spent too much time in small rooms with neon lighting.

“Ok – give me the facts,” I said. They started their story.

They kept all their critical documents in a Documentum system. For a document to get into the system required checks, reviews, and sign-offs. And to get access to a document was also damn difficult. Not just anyone could waltz in and read, or modify a document. It sounded more secure than Sing Sing

Some hired gun, with an IQ that was higher than my hourly rate, had recommended that they also use SharePoint 2007. This meant that they could also use SharePoint’s storage repositories for less critical documents, as well as create a “Portal” so that specific users would have their own customized work area. The only Portal I knew of was the back door of O’Leary’s bar. A “Portal” that I was frequently being ejected from by large gorillas.

Trudy explained that they were using special web parts that allowed SharePoint to display the folders, and documents stored in Documentum. They had created lots of SharePoint sites so that each ambulance chaser could work easily work with the documents, and tools, that they needed.

To make it easy for these shysters to search across everything (SharePoint and Documentum), an “Enterprise Search” site had been set up.

Trudy explained, in an excited voice, that they used something called “eResults” that let SharePoint crawl, and index, the documents in Documentum. The results were combined with the info that SharePoint had on the docs, etc, that it had in its own repositories, and when a search was done, the results were all displayed in one easy-to-read page.

A few of the lower level lawyers (the ones in the cheap suits) had complained that the search was not returning documents that they knew were in the system. It wasn’t until one of the partners of the law firm had complained that it become serious.

That’s when I was called…

to be continued…

…. Part 3

 

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