Archive for the ‘System Administration’ Category

Selling Search Internally–Part 1–How to get buy-in from your boss

by Karen Lynn

You are a <insert your profession here>  (Department Head, IT Leader, Operations Regional Manager, HR Manager, End User) in your business or organization. You have a problem. You can’t find information. Your staff is spending time tracking down that invoice from a few years ago, looking for the part number that a customer needs, searching for that great resume. It’s somewhere….but where? You see your staff is frustrated, disenchanted, defeated. You see that time is being wasted, and customers are grouchy because they can’t access products or information you have online. Maybe you’re losing customers. It’s hard to tell because you just got another 20 emails since you checked an hour ago and there are 10 reports on your desk awaiting your review. You are awash in information–drowning, and you are supposed to be in charge of keeping all this organized. Sound familiar?

Search solves this. Search, discovery, sharing information…it all leads to faster service to customers, less staff frustration, and higher productivity. It has been said that a good search solution either saves you money inside the firewall or makes you money outside the firewall. Either way, your organization is more competitive with a search solution that delivers the right information at the right time.

But how do you convince the boss that your company would benefit in an investment in search technology? This is the tricky part for many managers inside organizations. Search is hard, and often expensive. Here are the main points you should make with your boss.

  • Search isn’t a box, it’s an engine
  • Search makes money / saves money = bottom line results
  • Sharing information promotes better decision making, faster response time
  • Search will give your organization a competitive edge in a cutthroat marketplace

This isn’t a single conversation. The most successful campaigns for better search technology involve many voices, not just yours. An organized vocal group inside your organization who can present business leaders with a solution that will effect the bottom line is hard to ignore. And the basics in selling any idea to your boss should also be minded, such as:

  • If you come with a problem, come with a solution
  • Give real examples to back up your suggestions for improvement
  • Be diplomatic: even the best organizations can be political
  • Maintain relationships (don’t throw anyone under the bus)
  • Who will benefit and how?  Break it down for consideration

Change is tough, but I find that this saying by B.C Forbes sums up why it’s important to push the issue “If you don’t drive your business, you will be driven out of business.”

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Living with Bad Enterprise Search: The Costs of Not Finding What Your Business Needs

by Karen Lynn

“The jungle is dark, but full of diamonds.” said Arthur Miller. The same can be said about the invaluable data inside your business. It’s there, ready to be mined. But unless you have the right tools, you’ll never get to those diamonds.

Content is expanding at an exponential rate. I don’t know anyone in any business who can keep up with the pace of content growth, without the use of powerful search engines to find and extract relevant information. Business analysts expect content to grow 800% over the next 5 years. Business intelligence requires extraction of the right information, and most enterprises have both structured and unstructured data. Structured data is easy for most search engines to search. The rub is in unstructured content–of which there is abundance. Unstructured content is said to account for 70-80% of data in all organizations. This type of content is often in the form of documents, email messages, health records, HTML pages, books, metadata, audio, video, and various other files. All these files have to be “cleaned up” before feeding them through a search engine in order to get results with any kind of value or relevance.

Mining this data is going to be essential for not just the success, but the survival of many businesses. James Kobielus, an analyst at Forrester Research, reports in an interview with ComputerWorld that businesses will increasingly turn to a self-service BI throughout 2011 and beyond. “Increasingly, enterprises will adopt new Web-based interactive querying and reporting tools that are designed to put more data analytics capabilities into the hands of end users,” he said. A good search engine that can find data quickly and easily can “take the burden off IT and speed up the development of reports to a considerable degree,” Kobielus said. The information mined by a search engine tuned to the specific business needs facilities better decision making for people a every job function within the enterprise. “Because every business is a little different, and so many organizations house so much unstructured content, most search engines can’t cover everything that is needed without some customization” said Michael McIntosh, our VP of Search Technologies at TNR Global. “Data conditioning is vital to unstructured content. Without someone paying attention to filtering out the garbage in unstructured content, you’re not going to get a good search result. The last thing a business needs is it’s search results working against them.”

“The jungle is dark, but full of diamonds.” said Arthur Miller. Can your search technology find the gems buried inside your own business?

For more information on how data mining and a customized search engine can move your business forward, contact us for a free consultation.

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Posted in System Administration, enterprise search, search | Comments Off

Building for Enterprise Search: A Systems View, Part 2

by Karen Lynn

When we left off, Michael Klatsky, VP of Systems Administration was telling me how important communication between the systems side and search side of is to developing an enterprise search solution. The process of building, testing, monitoring, adjusting, more testing, and more monitoring ensures systems function that way they are intended to function. Let’s resume our conversation where Michael discusses the tools he uses to ensure the system he’s building works the way the client wants it to. This is the second portion of a two part blog post.
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Tools for BDD: Part 2

Karen: It’s sounding like the Search Team and Sys Admin Team need to have a good relationship and communicate often to ensure the system will accommodate the work the search team does.

Michael: Yes, search sometimes has to construct their scripts to conforms to systems. Testing is run on both sides, but small changes can affect others down the line, so it’s important to incorporate expected behaviors into modeling and monitoring on both applications and systems sides and how they interact with one another.

Karen: How do you make sure that happens?

Michael: We’re exploring some tools to help us make sure the machine will act just as we expect it to, like cucumber and cucumber nagios We’re using certain tools to facilitate the systems behaves in the way that we expect it to. We’re exploring cucumber for basic modeling and for testing. Cucumber is cool for testing because it returns values to you in colors. Red, meaning it failed, yellow meaning there’s problem, and green meaning its good. According to their docs, they instruct you to “keep running it until it’s a cucumber.”

Karen: Ah, I get it.

Michael: Right. And what cucumber nagios does is it takes cucumber and allows you to create a nagios monitoring check script. So if you pass, great, if you god red, nagios will throw an alert to the systems administrator so we have an opportunity to fix it before more is built.

Karen: Sounds like it’s an attentive way to build a system.

Michael: The only way to scale is to have machines do things for themselves. That’s the way to do it.

Karen: To automate.

Michael: Yes. Automation. Not to just set things up to automatically do configuration management beforehand, but to test afterwards to determine that your machine is behaving just as you (and your client) envisioned it.

For more information on how you can plan your enterprise search in cooperation with your systems administration team, contact us for a free consultation.

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Posted in System Administration, System Administration, enterprise search, search | Comments Off

Building for Enterprise Search: A Systems View, Part 1

by Karen Lynn

I sat down with our VP of Systems Administration, Michael Klatsky to discuss some of his thoughts on how Systems Administration needs to work in concert with the Search Team to implement search technologies for clients. This is the first portion of a two part blog post.

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Karen: You wanted to discuss how your approaching the systems side of search, and using a Behavior Driven Development (BDD) approach. Tell me about that.

Michael: Well, one of the problems we run into when systems brings up machines for enterprise search clusters is the search software (FAST ESP for example) is very particular about it’s environment- more so than many of the more common applications such as the Apache webserver. Properly configured DNS, specific environment variables, specific library versions have to be present. There are ownership and permissions that need to be in place, and performance metrics that must adhere to a given baseline. There can be slow disks can affect performance. There has to be the right amount of memory, and different classifications of systems roles. Currently, we have homegrown scripts that bring up systems, then we have other scripts we run to detect issues. These scripts will tell us if the system is ready for what we need it to do. We also monitor the systems for standard items such as diskspace, memory usage, as well as basic search functionality. For example we’ll run a quick search on say paper clips, and if comes back with results we know it’s running.

That’s what we’ve done historically. But now, we need to bring up larger numbers of machines,and have confidence that they will perform exactly as we expect. Additionally, we have a set of functional tasks that must be available without fail As we bring up clusters of larger numbers of machines, and as we need to be more nimble, how can we ensure that it will respond the way we expect it to?

Karen: This is where Behavior Driven Development comes in, right?

Michael: Right. There is a lot of discussion out there on Behavior Driven Development which would include behavior driven modelling, behavior driven monitoring, behavior driven architecture and infrastructure. So not only does a machine come up and is listening on these ports, but I can bring a machine up, I can go to that machine and I’m able to log in, install certain software, and peform tasks. I can go to another machine and perform a task. So, the question is, how do you model that? How do we ensure the system will behaves as it should?

Karen: So you’re looking at replicating the behavior of these systems so that every time we deploy something it will be the same way.

Michael: Right. And if a change is made, even a small change, we’ll see it right away because a system or service will fail and be able to fix it. Sometimes a service will fail silently. But we test and monitor constantly to ensure the system will do exactly what we expect it to do. It’s all a part of the build process.

Karen: Sounds like a smart approach.

Michael: Yes. And if we make a change, we’ll find out how that change will affect the rest of the system. For instance, we run tests and if something is wrong it should give you an error. For example if you change the location of your SSH keys. You may still be able to get into the machine by SSH, but one little change could make it impossible to SSH from one machine to another in the cluster. So rather than find that out after you begin your manual work on that, we make it part of the build process by constantly monitoring and testing the system as we build it.

Karen: It sounds like building a house and then realizing you have bricks out of place after it’s built.

Michael: Worse, it’s like building a house and realizing you forgot to build a door! At the very least while you are building, you can test, and let me know, “Hey! I don’t have a door to my house!” So that I can fix it before you move in.

There are certain things the search team needs to do to ensure their work will function in the system, like SSHing around the machines in the cluster–they need to be able to do that. There are certain ports that system need to be listening on, there are certain services that need to return a normal range of results. We need to define what a proper operation looks like. We can’t necessarily say that if we search for gold plated paperclips for example, that the search result should show 1000 results every time, that may or may not be the case–we don’t necessarily know if this is a proper result every time, but we should determine if the result returned is within a proper range of normal.

We’re defining what a proper operation looks like and ensure it functions that way. Part of the behavior driven model which is what I’m really interested in, we can set up a natural language looking config file. This config file should describe the actions or behaviors I expect. For example, when I go to ABC.com website and search for gold plated paperclips, I expect to see results. One result should be X. There should be more than Y results. When I return that result, I should be able to click on one result and go to that products feature list. Basically I’m describing how the customer will interact with the search, what I expect the customer to do, and design the system to respond with the customer’s actions in mind.

Karen: So your engineering it with the customer’s behaviors in mind.

Michael: That’s exactly what we’re doing. Then that if I look for a certain item, I get that result, describe the behavior of what the customer should do and make the system behave in cooperation with the customer behavior. We need to determine what right looks like, and have the system behave that way.

Karen: And what right looks like is really different for each client.

Micheal: Yes. You can write in somewhat natural English what that looks like. It’s not magic, but you still have to come up with specification of what right looks like. But you can do a lot of sophisticated things in this manner because you will know you’ll have a website that’s going to perform the way it’s suppose to perform. The bottom line is: Define what your systems should “look” like, deploy those systems using those definitions, and after deployment, test to ensure that those systems “look” like your definition.

For more information on how you can plan your enterprise search in cooperation with your systems administration team, contact us for a free consultation.

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Posted in Cloud Computing, System Administration, System Administration, enterprise search | Comments Off

Open Source Search: Isn’t It Expensive?

by Karen Lynn

You’ve heard the debate on open source search vs. proprietary search. One question that constantly comes up for prospective clients is “What’s all this going to cost me?”

In these times, it’s a good question. Because proprietary has neatly packaged, practically shrink wrapped plans, it’s much easier to discern how much you will spend on a solution. But how much will it cost? That’s an entirely different question.

I see you cocking your head sideways.

Proprietary search has hidden costs. What if the software doesn’t perform the way you need it to? Does the software understand the nuances of your business? How adaptable is it? How much will it cost to adapt that software to get it to perform the way my business needs it to? Questions like this need to be asked, and answered. Eventually you will ask yourself….why am I paying for all of this? And your developer will ask, “why can’t I access the source code?”

What I’m getting at is this: It is a reassuring feeling for a customer to see what a package costs, to understand what services you will get with a solution, and to anticipate what the licensing fee will cost on an annual basis. If it’s your job to research a solution and present findings to your executive team to make a decision, then proprietary search, on the surface, seems a more secure choice. But rarely, if ever, are these solutions a perfect fit for the customer. It’s like buying a Ferrari, with all the brand recognition and polish a Ferrari offers, and not ever driving it past second gear, or cutting the wheel more than 15 degrees, or getting a chance to have your trusted mechanic look under the hood. This is why open source is such a good solution for businesses who want their IT to move quickly.

We’re hearing more buzz about companies waking up to the agility of an open source solution. Most recently, with the acquisition of Autonomy by HP, the industry is telling stories of ex Autonomy customers migrating to Solr (open source search) with only the annual licencing budget to finance the migration. Without an annual expenditure of cash for licensing, and the freedom of not being under a licensing agreement, companies quickly recoup the initial expenditure of a migration.

What kind of car does your company drive?

If you are examining the different choices for implementing search technology in your organization, contact us.  We’re happy to talk to you about the best solution for your business.


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Posted in FAST ESP, System Administration, enterprise search, search | Comments Off

Setting JAVA_HOME on OSX lion

by Michael Klatsky

I recently upgraded to OSX 10.6.8 (Lion) and found that my JAVA_HOME was no longer set correctly. I found this out when my command line ec2 tools failed.

If you currently have your JAVA_HOME set to something like “/Library/Java/Home”,
under OSX Lion, you’ll want to change that to $(/usr/libexec/java_home), thus:

export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home)

The script /usr/libexec/java_home outputs the true location of JAVA_HOME, so unless that script goes away, this should prove upgrade safe.

I found this at http://steveswinsburg.wordpress.com/2011/07/22/java_home-on-os-x-lion/

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Cloud Platforms: The Promise vs. The Reality

by Karen Lynn

Recently our VP of Search, Michael McIntosh sat down and talked to me about his thoughts on cloud computing and what businesses should be aware of when investing in the cloud.


Karen: So, how does enterprise search and cloud computing fit together?  What’s good about it for companies?

Michael: The advent of cloud computing makes it a lot easier for companies to get into search without investing a huge sum of money up front. Some of the pay-as-you-go computing approaches make it possible to do things that in the past wouldn’t have been financially viable such as natural language processing on content.  Something that could have taken days, weeks, or even months can now take much less time by throwing more hardware at a problem for a shorter time span.

For example, you could throw 20 machines at a problem for 12 hours and do a bunch of computations in a massively parallel way, and then stop it as soon as it’s done….versus the old model where you have to buy all the hardware, or rent it, and make sure it’s not underutilized so you make your investment back.

But if you need a lot of processing power for a short amount of time, it’s really quite amazing what we can do now with an approach like this.

Karen: Is this a new technology for TNR?

Michael: TNR has been using cloud computing platforms for several years now—3 or 4 years.  Cloud computing in itself is sort of a buzz word, because distributed processing and hosting has been around for a while, but the pay-as-you-go computing model is relatively new. So we have a great deal of experience with the reality of cloud computing platforms vs. the promise of cloud computing platforms.

Karen: So, what is the difference between the “promise” and the “reality” of cloud computing platforms?

Michael: Well, A lot of people think of cloud computing as this magical thing; all their problems will be solved and it will be super dependable because there are very large businesses like Amazon running the underlying infrastructure and you don’t have to worry about it.

But, as the physical infrastructure becomes easier to deploy, other critical factors come into play. You won’t have to worry about the physical logistics of getting hardware in place. But, you will have to manage multiple instances, you have to make sure that when you provision temporary processing resources, you have to remember to retire it when it’s no longer needed. Otherwise you’ll be paying more than you need to. Since virtualization uses physical hardware you do not control or maintain—there are fewer warning signs to a potential systemic failure. Now Amazon, which is the one we use the most, does a good job of backing up instances and making things available to you even when there are failures. But we’ve had problems where we’ve lost entire zones. Even if we’ve had multiple machines configured with fault tolerance, Amazon has experienced outages that have taken entire regions offline despite every conservative effort to ensure continuous up time. So we’ve had our entire service clusters go down because of problems Amazon was having. It becomes critically important for companies to develop and maintain a disaster and recovery plan. Companies need to make sure things that are critical are backed up in multiple locations. Now historically, this has been hard to do because companies typically buy enough equipment for production needs, but not enough equipment for development and staging environments.

Karen: That sounds like a costly mistake.

Michael: It can be very costly because people often develop disaster recovery plans without ongoing testing to confirm the approach continues to work. If the approach is flawed, when you do suffer an outage, you can be offline for hours, days or weeks. Even worse, you may not be able to recover your data at all.

Karen: That sounds extremely costly.

Michael: Yes, it’s no fun at all.

There are upsides though. Some pluses are that cloud computing forces you to be more formal about how you manage your technical infrastructure. For example, for training purposes; with a new developer, we can just give them a copy of a production system, and have them go to town on it, make modifications, whatever without risking the actual production servers. And if they make a mistake, which is human (you have to factor in human error), you can reprovision a brand new one, and retire the one that is fouled up. Instead of having to spend hours and hours trying to fix the problem on the machine they were working on.

Karen: This sounds like it’s a lot more flexible and time efficient, with a layer of safety built in.

Michael: Yes. Cloud computing also comes in handy if you ever have a security breach. If a hacker gets into the system and the system is compromised–if this happens, system administrators can go in and try to correct the problem. But hackers can often install backdoors to get in and out. So a cloud platform with a good disaster contingency and backup can allow system administrators to bring a whole instance down and do the patch on a whole new machine without the security breaches and patches in place. This is pretty easy to do with a cloud platform.

Karen: So TNR can help their clients do all these things?

Michael: Yes, we’ve worked with large customers over many years and we’ve seen a wide variety of things that can possibly go wrong, and we’ve been through several physical service outages both with Amazon Web Services and with Rackspace.

Cloud computing in itself is no panacea, but if you have the technical and organization proficiency to effectively leverage the platform, it can be a powerful tool used to accelerate your company’s rate of innovation.

If you are assessing the cloud as a solution in your business, contact us.  There are a variety of options for hosting that can save your company money and minimize outages. Let us show you the option that is the best fit for your organization.

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Posted in AWS, Cloud Computing, Disaster Recovery, EC2, System Administration, System Administration, Virtualization | Comments Off

Migration from FAST ESP to Lucene Solr

by Tamar Schanfeld

Download the presentation and see the video.

Michael McIntosh, Vice President of Enterprise Search Technologies at TNR, spoke at the Lucene Revolution conference in Boston, MA October 7-8, 2010. Michael reviewed the migration from Fast ESP to Lucene/Solr open source search. He discussed approaches to identifying core content areas of HTML documents such as Text-To-Tag Ratio Heuristics and Page Stereotype/Site Template Analysis, and reviewed specific use cases that we have encountered as search integration experts and discuss available tools.

TNR Global was a sponsor of Lucene Revolution. The conference gathered over 400 professionals from the enterprise search industry. We were happy to see so much interest in Lucene/Solr open source search, and get to know and learn from the folks who have done large scale implementations, including Twitter, LinkedIn, and eHarmony.  Not surprisingly, there was a lot of interest about migration from proprietory search systems to Solr, especially from FAST ESP due to Microsoft’s discontinuing FAST ESP support for Linux.  If you would like to learn more about how a migration from FAST ESP to Lucene Solr can benefit your company, contact us for a free consultation.

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How to create a duplicate ESP collection without re-crawling!

by admin

In a production (or even stable) ESP environment, it is difficult to make a change to the Document Processing Pipeline and test it without wiping out the existing collection (not to mention the time it takes to perform a full re-crawl if the collection is even moderately large). In this case, the best option is to use postprocess to feed existing documents to a new (empty) collection.

Making a duplicate collection provides several benefits:

  • No re-crawling is required
  • The original collection is not affected by pipeline changes
  • You can test your new collection without touching the stable data
  • Upon determining that your changes are producing good results, you can easily migrate your front-end to the new collection while still maintaining existing stable data in the original collection (in case you want to revert your changes)

Steps to make a duplicate collection

  1. Using the ESP Admin GUI, create a new collection with the pipeline you would like to use (or test, as the case may be)
  2. Do not specify any data sources when configuring the new collection
  3. Stop the Enterprise Crawler:

    $FASTSEARCH/bin/nctrl stop crawler

  4. Run the following command where origcollection is the original collection and newcollection is the new collection (that you just created):

    $FASTSEARCH/bin/postprocess -R origcollection -k default:newcollection

    Notes about this command:

    • the default specified above is a content feeding destination, as specified in the destinations section of $FASTSEARCH/etc/CrawlerGlobalDefaults.xml. Specifying default will specify the destination as the current ESP install.
    • be sure to run the above command using either nohup or screen as it will not exit until all content has been fed to the new collection. For large collections this may take a while.
  5. Restart the Enterprise Crawler:

    $FASTSEARCH/bin/nctrl start crawler

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