We search customer support problem reports with Verity K2. When we recently upgraded to K2 6.1 we could no longer find some of the status messages in the call logs. These messages are often hexadecimal numbers of the form 0xFF0305. What's up?
This month Clinton gives us a Quick Start for building a K2 collection with the ODBC driver and Vspider. K2 is currently sold by Autonomy, though some people still refer to it as Verity K2.
Our web content includes links to other parts of our company as well as to external partner web sites. To get full control over what gets indexed for search on our site, we have decided to crawl our file system rather than try to set spider rules and depth that varies by which site we index. How can we assign a display URL in K2 so clicking on a link jumps to the right page, even though the Verity K2 vgkvgwkey is a fully qualified file name?
When we work with new customers, one of the first tools we tend to use it the powerful K2 utility rcvdk. Sometimes, customers are amazed that in this day of graphic dashboard, Java and JSP we continue to rely on a command line retrieval client. Sure enough, over time, our clients start to rely on rcvdk as well. Why?
The rcvdk tool provides direct low level command line access to a K2 collection at the file system level. It opens the collection directly, not through brokers, servers, or ticket servers, and it offers the best way to confirm that, at the lowest possible level, a collection is valid.
We're always looking for ways to make life easier for our customers who are often responsible for managing and maintaining large Verity installations with command line utilities and with web management interfaces that, while easier to use, don't always provide the data that IT staffs require.
This month a reader wanted to know if it was possible to use Java Ant, the Apache Project open source build tool, to manage Verity K2 collections. A full production-quality Java Ant script is beyond the scope of Dr. Search, although perhaps in the near future one of his associates will provide a script that you would be proud to put into production. However, in the meantime this should serve as a starting point for many of you.
Verity has released its Extractor product to provide some really interesting capabilities such as identifying and extracting content into specific fields and zones. Some old timers with Verity remember the 'TDE' capability that provided similar although less sophisticated capabilities years ago. For those of you who have forgotten about TDE, and for those of you who have started using Verity in the last few years and have not used it, you'll be glad to hear the TDE capability is still included in K2; the Collection Reference Guide still documents the capabilities even in K2 6.0.
The bad news is that none of the sample style sets use TDE at all. The good news is that if you want to try a "poor man's entity extraction", this article will show you how.
We removed the Windows domain user name that had been managing the Verity K2 console and now we cannot access the console. How can I reset the password without reinstalling K2?
What is query cooking and why would you want to use it?
Simply stated, query cooking is rewriting a query the user entered before running it. There are many reasons why you may want to do this. You could modify the query so that hits in more relevant fields are displayed first in the returned results. Security could be added to the query. You may want to optimize the query so it runs faster and uses fewer resources. You could also tune the query so that the results are what the user really wanted.
In previous versions of K2, we could rebuild a collection from scratch simply by taking the collection off-line, running mkvdk with the "-purge" option, and bringing the collection back online again.
We're now using the K2 Spider; and when we use our old scripts, the collection does come up empty; but the K2 spider seems to have its own database of indexed documents. When we restart the spidering job, no new documents are indexed.
How can we reset the spider to tell it to spider everything again?